Disagreements in the Church

Romans 14.1-12

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but modern Christians, as a group, don’t do well with nuance. Of course this isn’t a uniquely Christian problem: modern people in general don’t do well with nuance, because it blurs the lines between what is acceptable and what isn’t. Nuance makes it harder to figure out what we should do and what we shouldn’t. And the human attack on nuance has only gotten worse with the advent of social media: if a belief or opinion can’t be summarized in a meme, it’s not worth our time.

But here’s the problem: in the life of the church, nuance is absolutely crucial.

Here’s one example of why nuance is crucial, and I want to talk about this right at the beginning, because as we go through this text I know a lot of you will be thinking about it.

Have you ever heard someone say that when they spend time with Christians, they feel “judged”? Have you ever had a conversation with another Christian, in which that person disagreed with something you said or did, and you felt “judged”? The person who feels judged often feels justified in not paying any attention to what the person in front of them actually said—why? Because of course Jesus famously said, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Matthew 7.1). Paul says the same thing in this text. So obviously (we think), if you feel judged, the other person was wrong to make you feel that way.

In my opinion, we pull out that “I feel judged” card way too often, because we rarely stop to consider what “Do not judge” actually means in the context of the text and in the context of the Bible as a whole: we almost never consider that commandment in a nuanced way.

Take a step back and think about last week’s text. At the end of Romans 13, Paul calls us to “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light”. He calls us to “walk properly as in the daytime”—to not do in private those things we’d be ashamed to do in public. And he gives examples of what a few of these things might be: drunkenness, sexual immorality, quarreling, jealousy. There are many things God calls us to do and not to do, for our good, and those things are clearly laid out in his Word.

The church exists, in part, so that we might help one another “walk properly, as in the daytime”, that we might help one another “cast off the works of darkness.” That means that if we see someone doing something that is not in line with God’s character, we are called to talk to them about it. We’re called to do it with love, for their good, but also with clarity, showing why they shouldn’t act that way. If I find out that a brother is being neglectful toward his wife, or harsh with his children, I am called talk to him about it. Matthew 18.15: If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. Galatians 6.1: Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.

We need to be clear about something: this is not what Jesus or Paul are referring to when they say “Do not judge.” It can’t be, because God won’t call us to do something and not do something at the same time. Going and talking to someone about their sin is not “judging” them. In the same way, expressing a disagreement with someone is the same thing as “judging” them.

Most of us have seen Jaws (and if you haven’t, you should). If you’re at the beach with a friend, and he’s in the water, and you see a shark’s fin approaching your friend, what will you do? You’ll yell, “Shark! Get out of the water!”

In that circumstance, how will your friend respond? Will he say, “How dare you judge me because I’ve decided to swim here! Who are you to tell me what to do?” Of course not—he’ll start swimming for shore as fast as he can.

Why? Because it’s obvious that you yelling “Shark!” is not a judgment of his person, but of the situation. You are pointing out a danger, and coming to your friend’s rescue.

Whenever Jesus or Paul say “Do not judge”, they’re telling us not to evaluate someone else’s merit. If I judge someone, I’m deciding that that person is less legitimate as a Christian, or less worthy than myself. It’s obvious that we mustn’t do that, because no one is worthy of God’s grace.

But all disagreements are not that kind of judgment. And judging someone’s actions (as in, observing and noting that a given action is sinful) isn’t the same thing as judging the person.

In order to understand that, we need to approach these things with nuance.

That’s why I hate social media, and I love Romans 14. This chapter is basically an extended plea for nuance in the church, particularly in the way we approach disagreements over secondary issues. It is one of the most practically helpful texts, in regards to the life of the church, in all of Scripture. So we’re going to spend two weeks in this chapter together.

If you remember, last week Joe preached on the end of Romans 13, in which Paul says (v. 8):

Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

We like verses like that, because they sound nice. At least until someone shows up in the church who upsets the apple cart. In the life of the church, our love for one another is most frequently and violently tested when we come into disagreement with one another—often, instead of love, disagreements produce judgment: they cause us to consider someone else less legitimate or worthy a Christian than we are.

But in the life of the church, our love for one another is most frequently and violently tested when we have someone in front of us who tells us we’re wrong about something. Often, instead of love, disagreements produce judgment: they cause us to consider someone else less legitimate or worthy a Christian than we are.

That’s what we need to fight against, and that’s what Paul’s going to be addressing in this chapter. And he’s going to begin by showing us why disagreements shouldn’t break us: because all of our disagreements are ultimately before one Lord, and one Judge. And that Lord and Judge is not us, but God.

We Have the Same Lord (v. 1-4)

He begins by clearly setting the scene, establishing the context for what he’s addressing. He says (v. 1):

As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions.

There are two words in this verse that are vital to understanding what he’s talking about.

The first word is “opinions.” He’s not talking about sin, and he’s not talking about the truth of the gospel. He’s talking about what we often refer to as secondary issues.

We always have this conversation in the members’ class, but in case you haven’t gone through that yet, we need to talk about it. When I say “secondary issues,” here’s what I mean. There are some truths which are absolutely central to our faith: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God the Son, to save us from our sins; the divinity of Christ; the doctrine of the Trinity (one God, in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit). And there are more.

These are central tenets of the Christian faith; we cannot call ourselves Christians if we deny them.

But there are plenty of other issues that, while very important, we can disagree over without losing the core of the Christian faith. Then there are other issues that are less important than those. And others that are even less important. And so on.

We can disagree on a lot of things and still consider each other brothers and sisters in Christ.

And there are still other subjects that aren’t necessarily theological, but that are influenced by our theology. Should a Christian practice yoga? Listen to non-Christian music? Watch certain films? Dance? Drink alcohol?

He’s talking about opinions.

The second important word is the word “weak,” or “weak in the faith.”

The historical context is important here. He’s writing to Christians of both Jewish and Gentile origin, and while there’s nothing in Romans in indicate that there was open conflict in the church, there was certainly tension—he addressed this multiple times in the earlier chapters of the letter. But now, he gets more specific and addresses a specific subject. We don’t know if it’s an actual dispute that he heard was happening in the church in Rome, or just a hypothetical dispute, but it’s the kind of argument that, given the context in that church, would come one day if it hadn’t already, because it was so common in a mixed church like theirs.

The dispute in question is over the question of whether or not Christians needed to follow Jewish food laws in order to be acceptable to God.

He says (v. 1 again):

As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. 2 One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables.

So he’s made the truth of the matter clear—the one who believes there are certain things he should or shouldn’t eat is “weak”—but he’s not going into why that’s the case for now. For now, as he often does, he lays out the principle before getting into specifics.

And here’s the principle: if you see a Christian who you think is weak in faith, welcome them—but not to quarrel over opinons.

Why does he need to say this? Because one of the most common things a group of people who spend a lot of time together will do is sit down and eat together—and when you get to that table, inevitably, some of you are going to eat certain things, and some of you won’t. And (at least in this context) it’s not for health reasons, or ecological reasons, but reasons of theological conviction—those who eat all different kinds of meat do so because they truly believe it’s okay, and those who don’t eat certain meats refrain because they truly believe God wants them to continue to follow Jewish food laws.

One of you is right, and one of you is wrong. So how do you love each other—how do you remain in unity with one another—in such a context?

V. 3:

3 Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. 4 Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

That’s the first key: the “strong” brother shouldn’t pass judgment on the “weak” brother—he shouldn’t consider him as “less Christian” than himself. Why? Because God has welcomed you both.

Paul spent a long time earlier in the letter establishing how we are saved, and he was very clear that it is not through our obedience to God’s commandments, it’s not because we grew up with a particular ethnicity or culture; it is only because of the grace and mercy of Christ, who gave himself for us. If we have faith in Christ, if we have repented of our sin, then God has welcomed us both.

And if that’s the case, we will quickly see that we are in no position to look down on one another because of our opinions, because the brother or sister in front of you is not your servant, but God’s. It is before his own Lord, his own Master (God), that he stands or falls.

That’s a simple way of saying that eventually, our Lord will show us which opinions are wrong or right. I know some of you disagree with me on some secondary matters. That’s fine. There will come a day when I will discover whether my opinions over secondary matters are correct or not, and—here’s the important thing—on that day I won’t be standing before you all, but before God. He is my Lord, not you. He is your Lord, not me. It is before him that we stand or fall.

In either case, whether we’re right or wrong about these secondary issues, God has already “welcomed us”. And if that’s true—if he’s saved us—our opinions about these things won’t matter. We will be upheld, Paul says, because if we belong to him, he is able to make us stand. He will make sure that our opinions about secondary issues, even if they’re incorrect, will not make shipwrecks of our faith.

God is our only Lord. So every disagreement should be brought under his authority as Lord. It is before him that we stand or fall. We are not over one another as Christians, but side by side, under the same Lord.

We Have the Same Motivation  (v. 5-12)

Now already, this is argument enough: Paul’s proven his point and made a convincing case for how we should approach arguments over secondary issues in the church. He could have stopped there, and we would have reason enough to respond to one another with humility and patience in moments of disagreement.

But he’s going to go even deeper, and remind us that passing judgment on one another because of these matters should be entirely off the table, because God is our one and only Judge. V.5:

5 One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.

So here he’s giving another example of a common disagreement that would have come up at the time. The Jews observed (and some still do observe) many yearly feasts—special days where they remember the faithfulness of God in the past, or look forward to his promises fulfilled in the future. The Gentiles wouldn’t have observed these feasts. We can find the same thing, to a much lesser degree, in Christian churches today. Some churches will stick to a very strict liturgical calendar, others won’t. Some Christians think we should only gather for worship on Sunday, while others think we can gather on any day of the week.

Paul makes no judgment here on who is wrong or right—the person who considers some days more important than others, or the person who doesn’t. Instead, he focuses on what is most important, and that is that each one should be fully convinced in his own mind.

It’s a little frightening to realize how many of our opinions form all on their own. There are opinions we just absorb, through culture or family or media; others come because of personality, or situation, or maybe even just because it’s the easiest opinion to have.

Paul says this isn’t how we should think. The Christian should think hard about what he believes, and why. Opinions must not be formed by personality, or situation, or neglect, but through a rigorous examination of the Word of God, and prayer that God would give us wisdom to apply it. Whatever opinion we land on, it should come as a result of our submitting to God and doing the work of trying to know him. Wherever we land, we should be convinced.

Of course that’s not to say our minds can’t change. But (for example) we shouldn’t institute a rule for ourselves or for our homes if we’re not convinced it’s good to do so. Maybe tomorrow we’ll learn something that will change our minds. But for today, we’re convinced of this, so this is what we will do.

There are two interesting things about what he says here. The first is that he doesn’t say that it’s a bad thing for two Christians to be fully convinced of two opposite opinions. Difference of opinion over these secondary matters, like food and festivals, isn’t a bad thing. One of us is wrong and one of us is right. Or maybe we’re both wrong. So what? Does that change who we are before our Lord?

This is going to be hard for some of you to believe, but it’s true: entertaining the possibility that we’re wrong is unbelievably freeing. It means you don’t have to defend yourself to anyone. It means you don’t have to live with this constant fear that someone will think you’re a fraud. We’re all wrong about some things, and that’s okay. As long as the main things are clear in our minds—those truths which are central to the gospel—we can be mistaken in other areas, and nothing changes. If we have been saved by faith in Jesus Christ, through the proclamation of the gospel, we can be wrong and still know that we are loved and accepted by God, united to our brothers and sisters in Christ.

It’s not a bad thing that there are sometimes disagreements over secondary issues—it would be pretty strange if there were none.

The second interesting thing Paul shows us here is that in both cases—whether you observe the feasts or you don’t—you can both have the exact same motivation for doing it. And it’s the motivation that is most important. V. 6:

6 The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God.

You see, whether it’s a question of our habits or our decisions or our opinions, the same thing should motivate the follower of Christ: a desire to honor the Lord, and gratitude for his grace to us.

I have friends, brothers and sisters in Christ, who baptize their babies. I firmly disagree with this practice. This is a Baptist church; we believe that we are called to baptize Christians upon profession of faith—that is, we believe baptism should be the choice of the person getting baptized, and they should be able to understand and articulate their desire to follow Christ. Babies can’t do that.

But here’s the thing: whatever our conviction around baptism, all of us hold these convictions and remain firm in them because we want to honor God, and because we are thankful for his grace to us. That’s why I can discuss this subject with someone, but I’ll never get into a fight with them over it. It’s a matter of secondary importance. We can agree to disagree.

The point here is that we can be fully convinced of two different opinions on a secondary matter, and still have the same motivation: a desire to honor the Lord, and gratitude for his grace to us.

Now here’s the problem. I know that some of you are hearing me say all this, and your heads are about to explode. Because you love the Bible, you love theology, you love orthodoxy, and it feels to you like everything we’re talking about today just opens the door to a really dangerous mentality that says, “Believe whatever you want, as long as you have the right motivation.”

Let me reassure you; that’s not what I’m saying, because that’s not what Paul’s saying. The Bible is important. Our understanding of the Bible is important. Right doctrine is important. Right application of doctrine is important.

But this text is not talking about how we see doctrine; it’s talking about how we see people. I said earlier that in this text Paul gives an extended plea for nuance in the church; I didn’t just mean theological nuance, but relational, interpersonal nuance. It’s the nuance that allows us the Christian to see his brother or sister as a person, rather than a human repository of doctrinal ideas.

So often people who are new to the faith want to simply talk about God with other believers, but end up getting sucked into theological debates that they have no idea how to handle. And they leave those discussions feeling like their hearts have been torn out, because instead of being built up by their brother or sister, they’ve just been pretty harshly criticized for not knowing something they haven’t had time to learn yet.

Or someone who has been a Christian for a long time, but comes from a different church background, comes into the church and feels unwelcome and unwanted because they disagree on a secondary matter. (And I’m not speaking hypothetically—both of these things have happened before, in this church.)

Paul is not saying secondary issues are unimportant; he’s saying that the body of Christ is more important. We can disagree on secondary issues and still recognize that we have the same motivation for our convictions—and in v. 7-9 Paul tells us how that’s possible.

V. 7 :

7 For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. 8 For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. 9 For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.

Do you see his logic? Christ came, and died, and was raised in order to be shown as the Lord of all things—of the dead and the living. So ultimately, we do not belong to ourselves, but to God. Everything we do—how we live and how we die—is for him, and in life and in death, we are his. That means that everything we have, in life and in death, we have through him and in him. And our thankfulness for his grace will give us a firm desire to honor him in everything, which means we’ll desire to think hard about what he tells us in his Word, and how we believe that applies to our lives.

But at the same time, because we know that we needed his grace and forgiveness, we’ll remember that we’re fallible human beings, and there are some secondary things we may get wrong. So we’ll apply our convictions with humility, we’ll discuss our opinions with humility, because we know that we’re imperfect, and we know that God has welcomed and rules over the brother or sister in front of us, just like he welcomed us and rules over us. V. 10:

10 Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God; 11 for it is written,

“As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me,

and every tongue shall confess to God.”

12 So then each of us will give an account of himself to God.

Christ’s lordship over us, his grace to us, is the great equalizer: it puts us all in the same situation of knowing that all we have and all we are belongs to him, and he is the one who will ultimately judge whether our convictions over secondary matters is right or wrong. If I get to heaven, and Christ tells me that I’ve been wrong this whole time and should have baptized babies, I’ll thank him for clearing that up, and marvel once again at his grace in saving imperfect people like me. (I don’t think that will happen—like I said, I’m convinced this is the right way to go—but if it does, it’ll be okay.)

The point here is that Christ is the one Lord over all; it is he who has the authority to judge us over these matters. So I have no legitimacy or reason to despise a brother or a sister because they don’t see these secondary issues the way I do. Christ will judge these matters; it is before him that we will give an account, and he’s promised to defend us on that day, because his blood has covered our mistakes.

Conclusion

Now, what does this look like on the ground? You’re at the dinner table, and you hear someone saying something, expressing a theological opinion. How do you respond? How should the rest of that conversation go?

That’s a hard question to answer, and we’ll have to grow in this over the course of our entire lives. But let me suggest a good place to start—a new way of engaging in conversation. Instead of expression your opinion right away, ask questions. And not the sort of snarky, trick questions Christians are often so good at, but humble questions. “Why do you approach this like this? What shaped that conviction? I feel like we should do it differently, but I could be wrong, and I want to learn.”

If all of us approach these conversations with humility, then the result will always be growth and brotherly love—even if neither of us changes our minds. These conversations give us a chance to flex our theological muscles, to flex our relational muscles, to come closer to a brother or a sister instead of further away. It helps sharpen us.

Because Christ is our Lord and our Judge, we can disagree on a great number of things, and still leave those conversations knowing we are loved and united to one another. Because ultimately we don’t belong to one another, but to him—whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.

Submit to the Governing Authorities

Romans 13.1-7

I’ll be honest with you: when I sat down to begin preparing this text, I was already a little annoyed with the idea of it, because any time you preach on a series of commandments or principles, you’ll inevitably have people looking for a loophole. The more difficult the teaching is, the more people start looking for exceptions to the rule. For example, any time you preach on sexuality, people start asking, “Okay…but what about this? Can we do this?”

There are few topics in the Bible more likely to provoke this “What-about-this-ism” than the topic of submission to the government—especially when you’re preaching on this subject in France, a country in which rebellion against the government is practically part of our national identity.

But God inspired this passage for a reason, and all of his Word is helpful for the church, so no matter how unpleasant we might find it, what he says here is good for us. (FYI: We won’t be taking a break during the message today, because if all goes well this message will be a little shorter than usual. If you all start throwing tomatoes at me, we’ll be here longer.)

Context

Just a few words before we get into the text itself. As you’ll remember, Paul laid out this beautiful description of God’s grace to us in Christ in chapters 1-11, and then he began laying out what our proper response should be. He began chapter 12 by saying,

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

So the idea here is, in the light of all of God’s graces to us, we should respond by presenting our bodies as sacrifices to him, and allowing him to transform us into Christ’s image. He’s given several examples so far of what that looks like: humility; self-sacrificing service in the church; genuine love and passionate obedience to God’s commandments outside the church; kindness to our enemies rather than retaliation.

Chapter 12 was all about how our understanding of God’s grace to us, and our love for God in response, should shape our character and drive us to love one another. He’ll come back to that subject in v. 8 of chapter 13. So these first seven verses of chapter 13 might seem a bit out of place, like an interruption of his main thought.

But we still have good reason to think this interruption—or rather this parenthesis—was intentional. Paul is speaking to Gentile and Jewish Christians in Rome, and if we remember our gospels, we know that there were few people the Jews hated more than the Romans, because the Romans were the ones occupying Israel. Christians weren’t yet openly persecuted by the Romans (Christianity was frowned upon, to be sure, but it wouldn’t be illegal in the Roman Empire until A.D. 67, a few years later, under Emperor Nero), but let’s just say the two groups weren’t fond of each other. So few things could have been more surprising than to hear Paul take his teaching on love, and apply it to the hilt—all the way to the governing authorities.

Submission for the Sake of God (v. 1-2)

We’ll go through v. 1-2 quickly, because they’re not that complicated, and here he lays out his main point, his guiding principle. Romans 13.1-2:

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.

So many Christians in the West come at this text looking for the loophole, thinking, When DON’T I have to obey? Often the way we think is, if we voted for those in power, we love this passage. If we didn’t vote for them, we hate this passage (and often feel justified in ignoring it). But Paul won’t allow us to be subject to a governing authority only if we personally approve of them. It has nothing to do with our feelings, our political opinions, or our own personal comfort.

The ultimate reason why he calls us to submit to the governing authorities is because only Jesus Christ is King. Christ is our ultimate authority; he is the only being to whom we owe our total allegiance and worship and reverence. It is our allegiance to him that drives us to submit to the authorities he has put in place.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.

You see, this isn’t really about the government at all, but about God. Paul is calling us to recognize God’s sovereignty over all of human life—even over human government. Christ is King, so we can submit to the governors to whom he has given authority. Thomas Schreiner said it this way: “From a human perspective, rulers come to power through force or heredity or popular choice. But the 'transformed mind’ recognizes behind every such process the hand of God.” Or, as Daniel tells the king in Daniel 4.17, “the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.”

God calls us to be subject to our governing authorities because the authority they have ultimately comes from him. We might ask why he allowed so-and-so to come to power, but that he did allow them to come to power is inarguable. So to resist that authority is to resist God himself, Paul says in v. 2. Ultimately, we don’t submit to the government because the government deserves our submission; we submit to the government because God deserves our obedience.

Submission for the Sake of Security and Conscience (v. 3-5)

That’s the big idea here. But obviously, you can’t get through v. 1-2 without a whole host of objections coming to mind. But Paul goes a long way towards helping answer those objections in v. 3-5, and he also helps us better understand what kind of submission he’s talking about. V. 3:

3 For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, 4 for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. 5 Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience.

Now of course the classic objection that comes to our minds is, for example, “What about those people who hid Jews from the Nazis during World War II? Should they have submitted?”

Of course the answer is no—but this is still the Word of God we’re talking about; we can’t allow ourselves to just throw away a portion of it because we can’t quite see how it circles the square. We have to do the work to think about it biblically.

I almost brought this up last week, but I was running a bit too long so I saved it for today.

Starting in Romans 12, verse 9, a stylistic change takes place that I’m sure you noticed. Paul begins applying sweeping instructions over a broad range of topics; our lives with God, our lives with the church, our lives outside the church, our lives with our enemies. From there all the way until around Romans 13.10, his writing becomes quite similar to what we see in wisdom literature, like the Proverbs or Ecclesiastes.

It’s not accidental: Paul knows the Bible better than any of us, and even quotes the Proverbs more than once in these passages. He knows what he’s doing. Wisdom literature always sets up principles that are meant to be applied situationally.

For example, in chapter 12, verse 20, he quotes Proverbs 25, saying, “If your enemy is hungry, feed him.” The situation is clear here: we’re not to conclude that the Bible calls us to force-feed our enemy whether or not he’s hungry. If your enemy is hungry, then feed him. Do him good, rather than harm, no matter what he’s done to you. The point is that Christian love calls us to show kindness to our enemies, which will force them to come face-to-face with the harm they are causing.

Paul picks up the format of wisdom literature quite often, and that’s what he’s doing here. He’s setting up principles that are meant to be applied situationally. Wisdom literature in the Old Testament always addresses best-case scenarios: in the normal state of things, this is how we should behave. It speaks less of what we should do in a given situation, and more of what kind of people we should be. It speaks less of our actions, and more of our character.

In other words, no matter how adept we might be at finding exceptions to what Paul is saying, those exceptions don’t apply here; that’s not what he’s talking about.  We have several examples in the Bible of times when civil disobedience is praised—for example, in Exodus 1, when the Pharaoh orders that Hebrew baby boys be killed, two midwives hid the babies then lied about it, they were rewarded by God. Or there’s Daniel refusing to only pray to the king in Daniel 6. Or Peter and the apostles refusing to stop preaching the gospel in Acts 5.

Paul knows these examples well, and calls us to be subject to the governing authorities, not to obey them blindly in every conceivable situation. He’s laying out a principle that applies to the normal state of things. And we know this because in v. 3, he says that rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. That is the normal state of things; that’s how it’s supposed to work.

But we could put it another way: if our rulers become a terror to good conduct, that’s when we have a problem. A Christian living in a country where Christianity is illegal should continue to live for Christ and find ways to wisely share the gospel, even though it’s against the law.

And there may be some instances when this is the case for us today in France. If the government doesn’t allow us to obey God, or requires us to sin, then our response will be, “We must obey God rather than man.”

But let’s be honest: that’s not the situation most of us are in, is it? Those instances, if they come up, are rare in France. The French government might promote things that are sinful; it definitely allows things that are sinful.  But in most situations, the government doesn’t prohibit us from obeying God, and it doesn’t require us to sin against God.

Again, Paul is laying out a general principle here; like the Proverbs, he is telling us how we should behave in the normal state of things.

And the general principle is this: God, in his common grace, has allowed human governmental structures to exist in order to suppress criminality and to encourage good citizenship—to provide security, for the good of the people living under those governments. Of course some governments corrupt this goal, and become “a terror to good conduct”. That’s not the situation he’s speaking about here.

God gives authority to those in power in order for them to be servants for our good—to protect those who do good, and to carry out at least some measure of God’s wrath against those who do wrong. It’s not the full measure of God’s wrath—that will be carried out by God himself on the day of judgment—but it is a measure of God’s wrath.

For example, in France today, you won’t go to jail for having a conversation about Jesus with a friend. You will go to jail if you murder someone. Generally speaking, this is how it works. So the first reason why we submit to the governing authorities, Paul says, is to avoid the wrath of God against sin, which the government has at least some hand in carrying out. We submit to the government for our own safety and well-being, and for the safety and well-being of our neighbors.

The second reason is much simpler: we submit to the governing authorities for the sake of conscience. If the laws in place are meant to provide protection for those who do good and punish those who do wrong, then obeying those laws is simply the right thing to do, and God calls us to do what is right—to flee sin, in all of its forms, even if we consider those forms to be harmless. We obey traffic laws, not just for the safety of the other cars around us, but because we want to obey God. In Psalm 32 David talks about how his bones wasted away, how his strength was dried up, when he knew he had disobeyed God and hadn’t acknowledged his sin. A clean conscience is restorative; a clean conscience before God gives us rest.

We obey the law, even if we think no one will see and there will be no consequence for us or for anyone else, because we want to honor our God through obedience to him, in every aspect of our lives—even the most inconsequential.

Submission as an Expression of Love (v. 6-7)

So we submit to the governing authorities, firstly, because God has given them the authority they have. We submit to them to protect us from God’s wrath (which is in some measure executed by them) and to enjoy the common grace he brings about through them. We submit to them for the sake of our own conscience.

Lastly—and this one may be the most difficult—we submit to our leaders as an expression of love. V. 6:

6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. 7 Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

Why do I call this submission an expression of love? Because he is showing us what it looks like to offer ourselves as living sacrifices to God, in response to his grace to us in Christ; and the through-line that drives our sacrifice, as he established in chapter 12, v. 9, is Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. He’ll explicitly return to this love just after, in chapter 13, v. 8. This isn’t a change of subject.

It’s pretty interesting: he acts like an accordion here. He begins with the area of our lives over which we have a good deal of influence—our lives with one another in the body of Christ (12.1-13). Then he widens the scope and includes those over whom we have less influence—our neighbors, those people who surround us (12.14-21). Then he widens it even further, and speaks of those over whom we have very little influence at all—the governing authorities (13.1-7). Then he squeezes back in again, speaking about our neighbors (13.8-14). And finally he goes back to where he started, bringing us back to our lives with one another in the church, particularly those over whom we have massive influence: believers who are weaker in their faith, whom we can teach how to live for Christ (14.1-15.7).

In all of those contexts, no matter what our level of influence, the motivating factor behind all we do is love—love for God and love for one another. Obviously, this love will look and feel different for those in power than it will for our neighbors or for those in the church; but even our limited interactions with them should be guided by the same love for God, which should produce in us (as weird as it sounds) a love for our leaders.

What will this love look like in practice? Paul gives us an example: paying our taxes (which in part provide for our leaders’ revenue), and respecting and honoring them.

Now of course they’ll probably never see this; Emmanuel Macron won’t know if you show him respect in the way you obey the law or pay your taxes or speak about him. But it doesn’t matter. God will see it, and so will other people. No matter what you may personally think about our president, Paul says that he is (in the limited sense of the word) a “minister of God,” that is, God has given him the authority he has to fulfill a certain function in our society. We may disagree with the ways he goes about fulfilling that function; but we are called to respect him as the one God has put in place to fulfill it.

It is very possible to express disagreement and even discontent in a respectful way, in a way that honors him. One simple example comes to mind: you’re sitting with other believers, and someone starts complaining about something or other that the president has done. And you’re all in agreement: the president made a decision, and it was a bad decision. But instead of just endlessly griping, you pray for Macron together: that God would give him wisdom, that God would give him clarity, that God would guide his decisions.

Love should also motivate us when we pay our taxes—love for God, who tells us to be subject to the governing authorities (that’s why he says in v. 6 that we pay our takes also for the sake of conscience); love for those authorities, who are ministers of God to fulfill their function in society; and love for our neighbor, who will benefit from the services those taxes provide, just as we will. It doesn’t matter whether we agree in every point with how those taxes are put to use. What matters is that because we are submitted to King Jesus, we can submit to those he put in power over us.

Conclusion

Now I know that some of you have been listening to this without listening to this; the second you saw that this was the subject of today’s text, you turned off your brains and started imagining something else, waiting until for me to finish. I get it; this is a text that is so far removed from your natural way of thinking that it seems easy to dismiss.

So let’s just remove the question of the government for a minute. This text doesn’t just address our attitude towards the government, but our attitude towards authority in general.

Our problem here isn’t fundamentally with the government, no matter what government we’re talking about. We have two main problems, and we’ve had them since Genesis 3: we have a problem with pride, and we have a problem with trusting that our God is a good God.

We want to be our own masters, because despite all the evidence to the contrary, deep down we think that we are better masters than God is—otherwise he wouldn’t ask us to do such ridiculous things, like submit to the governing authorities. We want to be our own masters because we’re not entirely sure that God is actually a good God, because he asks us to do things we don’t want to do—even sometimes things that will be painful for us.

But Paul presses hard against that pride and mistrust in this passage. To our surprise, he tells us that authority, at its core, isn’t what we think it is: authority is a good thing. God exercises his authority with infinite wisdom and perfect justice, often through human authority—whether it’s the authority of the government, authority at work, or authority in the home. So because we know we can trust in him, we can submit to them.

This is how Jesus himself lived. He accepted God’s authority, exercised through human means, even when it literally killed him. He knew what would happen if he accepted God’s authority over his impending crucifixion, and he said as much. In Luke 22.42, he prays, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

Why did he accept his Father’s authority? Because no matter how painful it was for him personally, he knew that God’s authority was good, and he knew that God’s plan was good. Christ knew that his death would bring about an eternity of joy for himself and his people—all of us who have received forgiveness of sin through his sacrifice for us. In the moment, submission to God’s authority may cost us everything; in the light of eternity, what we lose is nothing compared to what we gain. Because God is our authority, because he cares for us, we don’t need to fear losing anything for the sake of our obedience to him. It’s worth it, and we what we gain through obedience to him is far more than what we stand to lose.

We can submit even to imperfect authority, because God’s authority is good, and his wisdom is infinite, and his justice is perfect. In the normal state of things, this is what he calls us to do. And when the state of things becomes abnormal—when the authorities prohibit us from obeying God, or demand that we sin—we submit ourselves to God’s authority for the same reasons: because his authority is good, and his wisdom is infinite, and his justice is perfect.

In both cases, our attitude towards those in authority—the attitude that the French around us will see—is a powerful testimony of the gospel’s power, because they will see something unusual in us. They will see our desire to be humble, and to give to each what he is owed: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. They will see the change God has brought about in us—they will see our “renewed minds”—and God will use it for his glory.

The Character of a Living Sacrifice

Romans 12.9-21

If you were here throughout last year (particularly the first half of the year, from about October to March), you’ll remember that we went through a particularly rough period as a church. There was tension, there was division and gossip, and although it only directly effected a handful of people in the church, it was felt by everyone. It was a profoundly difficult time, both for you (church members) and for us.

Romans 12.9-21 was written as a protection for that kind of situation. No church will ever be immune to what we went through, but the commands in this text help mitigate the damage. And the wonderful thing we saw is that it did just that. Many of you who were directly impacted by that situation actually took on the characteristics Paul exhorts the Romans to take on here, and while it was painful for you, you actually grew through that experience instead of being crushed by it.

I am so grateful for what God did in you and through you last year, that we got to see the effects of these commands actually play out in our church. But there is always more work to be done, so this text will always be a precious help to us.

Last week we saw that the first eleven chapters of Romans are a breathtaking description of God’s grace and mercy to us in Christ—and because of this grace, Paul begins chapter 12 by saying:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

I’m probably going to be re-reading these two verses at the beginning of every sermon for the next couple months, because everything we see up through the beginning of chapter 15 is the application of these two verses. Paul says, because of God’s incredible grace and mercy to us, we are called to present our bodies as living sacrifices to him—everything we have, everything we are. Transformed progressively from top to bottom, we give ourselves wholly to him. What does that look like?

Last week we saw the first two ways in which our sacrifice should manifest itself: we should consider ourselves soberly, humbly, and not think too highly of ourselves; and secondly, we should use everything he has given us to serve the body of Christ.

Those two calls, while not always easy to do, are relatively straightforward. They are things that we do. We remind ourselves to think objectively about ourselves and others, and we work hard with the gifts he has given us to serve the body of Christ.

But—as you’ll quickly see if you read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), it’s not just about what we do, but about what kind of people we are. It’s not just about our actions, but about our character.

Summary: Love Sincerely, Obey Passionately (v. 9)

That is essentially what Paul does today. He continues giving commands that flesh out what it means to present our bodies as sacrifices to God—and he begins with a verse that serves as a summary of everything he’ll say next. V. 9:

9 Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.

The overarching principle here is that the Christian is to be characterized and motivated by sincere love (cf. John 13.34), which works itself out in obedience to God and care for others.

If we want to know if our love is genuine, we shouldn’t look at our feelings, but at our lives. We say we love each other—how do we serve one another? How do we give ourselves up for one another? We say we love God—how do we present ourselves to him as a living, holy and acceptable sacrifice to him?

Love produces obedience, and if our love for God is sincere, our obedience won’t be begrudging or half-hearted; it will be passionate. He says to abhor what is evil and to hold fast to what is good: not do what is good even though you kind of miss the sin you left behind.

If you don’t feel like this is the case for you today, rest assured: I don’t either. I don’t think anyone can look at themselves and think that their love for God and others is totally without hypocrisy, and that they never have sinful desires. As we saw last week, this is the trajectory of a person who has been saved by the grace of God in Christ, who understands “the mercies of God” Paul laid out in chapters 1-11. This is the trajectory of someone who is being “transformed by the renewal of their mind.”

So sincere love and passionate obedience are the two overarching principles here, and Paul is going to expand on those principles to our lives in the body of Christ. Then he’ll widen the scope to include not only how we interact with our brothers and sisters, but how we interact with those outside the church—even with those whom we could consider enemies.

Love and Obedience in the Church (v. 10-13)

In v. 10-13, Paul gives us lots of different imperatives that can be separated into four distinct commands, that act almost like a sandwich: two commands concerning our relationship with God, and on either side of those, two commands concerning our relationships with one another.

We find the first command in v. 10, which is simple: Love one another like a family. V. 10:

10 Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.

This command to love one another with brotherly affection is a very interesting command to give to people in Rome, at this point in time. This “brotherly affection” is a familial love: it’s the love we feel in a close-knit family. This was a radical departure from the norm, and often still is today—because, as the saying goes, blood is thicker than water. Or, as The Godfather taught us: family is everything.

These Jews and Gentiles in Rome are looking at each other, saying, “These people aren’t my family.”

And Paul says, “They absolutely are.”

Look around you. The people sitting around you, if they share your faith in Christ, are your family, in an even more profound way than your own family is your family. The unity he has brought to the church is not only deeper than our blood ties, but it is eternal, wrought by God himself.

And if we truly and sincerely love one another with brotherly affection, we will outdo one another in showing honor.

This is another massive departure from the norm. The culture into which Paul is speaking was an honor/shame culture (similar to the cultures many of you grew up in). The right way to live was to seek honor for yourself. And while this isn’t as much of a cultural norm for us today in the West, it’s definitely still natural to think this way.

But Paul flips this instinct on its head, saying, “No, don’t seek honor; give honor. Let your goal be, not: How can I gain the most honor for myself? but rather, How can I GIVE the most honor to my brothers and sisters?”

The CSB’s translation of this verse is also good: “Take the lead in showing honor.” It should be our instinct to want to see others honored rather than ourselves.

Often it goes the other way—we see someone honored for something they’ve done well and we feel jealous. We’d love to be in their shoes. But if our love for them is genuine, if it is brotherly affection, then seeing them  honored in ways that we are not will never be a disappointment, but a joy; in fact, we should be actively seeking ways to honor them instead of ourselves.

Why? Because if the body actually functions like this, everyone is honored. There is no reason for jealousy, because everyone will be constantly reminded that everyone is valuable, a member of the body with their own specific gifts to contribute.

What could be more surprising, in this Instagram world, than a group of people in which everyone is honored, and no one seeks honor for themselves?

Here’s the second command for the church: Love the Lord with intensity. V. 11:

11 Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.

This one bites.

Think of how incredibly productive we can be when we’re doing something we love—whether it’s a job or a leisure activity. We are capable of putting in long hours, of being hyper concentrated, of centering all our enthusiasm on what we love.

Compare that concentration and that enthusiasm to what we bring to the Bible and prayer, what we bring to our service to God.

We present ourselves as “living sacrifices” to a lot of things—while often God gets the sloppy seconds.

If we keep Romans 1-11 in mind, it is obvious that it should be the other way around. Our zeal for the Lord should outpace our zeal for anything else we love. Why? Because our love for him should be genuine—after all he’s given us, this is our reasonable worship. It’s the only response that makes sense.

Now, all of us will hear that and immediately feel guilty, because all of us are “slothful in zeal”, none of us are “fervent in spirit” to the extent that we should be. Remember, this isn’t a command to condemn—there is no condemnation in Christ—but to set the goal. This is where we should be headed.

Next: Trust the Lord with firm assurance. V. 12:

12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.

As long as we are living in this world, tribulation will be constant. It’s part of living in a fallen world. So our eyes should be set on the hope that we have, and we should be so focused on this hope that it actually brings us joy.

The Bible doesn’t speak of hope the way we do; it’s not a kind of wish for something we don’t know will happen (like, “I hope it won’t rain tomorrow”). It’s the confidence we feel in what we know is coming.

I’ve used this image lots of times, but I’ll say it again. Hope in the Bible is like that feeling you get when you’ve been away from home for a long time, and you’re finally going back. Your plane has landed, you’re standing up and gathering your things, and you’re excited, because you know that just beyond that ramp, just on the other side of that wall, your family’s waiting for you. You can’t see them yet, but you know they’re right there.

This hope is both the fuel for our joy, and our security when troubles come. So how do we grow in that hope?

There are several ways, but constant prayer is one of the best: prayer is one of the best tools God gives us to help focus our attention on our hope. It’s a little like watching a baby laugh hysterically. No matter what you’re going through, how miserable you are, when you see a baby just losing it with laughter, you can’t help but crack a smile.

In a much deeper way, prayers of thankfulness for God’s faithfulness to his promises are an antidote to sadness in tribulation. They remind us of what’s actually true, not just what’s apparently true. They recenter our focus on what is coming, not just what’s here. And they teach us to patiently wait for those promises, to rejoice in the hope we have.

Now, I’ve noticed something over the years. I’m not sure how to explain it, or why this is the case, but it almost invariably is: those Christians who rejoice in the hope of God’s faithfulness to his promises, who are the most constant in prayer, will almost always be the most focused on the needs of their brothers and sisters in Christ.

If we trust in God’s promises, we know those promises are not only for us, but for all the family of God. So our joy in the hope we have in God motivates us to care for one another with generosity—which is the fourth command we see here.

V. 13:

13 Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.

I’m close to both of my brothers, and Loanne is close to hers. If one of my brothers, or Loanne’s brother, showed up on our doorstep today, that door would be open. We wouldn’t even need to think about it, because they’re family.

It’s not quite so obvious when we’re talking about the church, because we forget that we’re family. So we have to go out of our way to show one another that we are here for them. To the best of our ability, we should pursue hospitality (as one translation says), pursue ways to show our brothers and sisters that our door is open to them, that we want to help care for them if they need it.

I hope you see what Paul’s doing here. Last week we spoke of using our gifts for the good of the body. In these verses, Paul tells us what should undergird our service: he describes what motivates our service and what characterizes it. Sincere and brotherly love, a passion for holiness, a desire to honor one another, a dedication to reminding one another of the hope that we have, joyful sacrifice for one another, hospitality.

Do you see why everything we see in these verses is so important to the conversation we had last week? The character of the body of Christ is what can prevent someone with a visible gift—whether it’s the preacher or the leaders or the musicians—from becoming prideful and jealous. And it is also what prevents someone with a less visible gift—someone who encourages or helps set up before service, for example—from feeling inferior. Godly character in the body of Christ reminds us that the important thing isn’t the gift at all, but rather the people we’re serving. It doesn’t matter what we do; what matters are the brothers and sisters for whom we sacrifice ourselves.

Love and Obedience in the World (v. 14-16)

In v. 14, we see a continuation of this list of commands, but there is a subtle shift that takes place. It’s not exact—there are some things here that could easily have gone into the previous list—but it is noticeable, because Paul begins v. 14 by speaking of persecution, before actively naming the object of our attention as “your enemy” in v. 20. This can happen in the body of Christ, but at least in a healthy church, someone who could be characterized as an “enemy” or a “persecutor” of the church will more likely come from outside.

So these verses are drawing our attention to how we are to live, not only in the church, but in the world—even with those who oppose and persecute us.

V. 14:

14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight.

So v. 14-16 speak about what should characterize our interactions with everyone—with other Christians in the church, yes, but also with people outside the church. Simply put, two easily perceptible marks of the Christian should be genuine empathy and, again, genuine humility.

He puts these two together, I think, because one produces the other: empathy and humility feed each other. 

We pursue humility because humility sands off the rough edges. It allows us to live in harmony, even with those with whom we have nothing in common. (Obviously Paul is not saying that we must always agree with everyone, or compromise our convictions, but rather express our disagreements and convictions in such a way that our love is evident.)

Humility makes us see others differently. It allows us, not necessarily to understand what someone else is going through, but at least to recognize that their pains and their joys are real, and it drives us to not let them stay alone. Because God didn’t leave us alone. The gift of simple human presence must not be underestimated, and unfortunately unbelievers often do this better than we do.

Now of course, these attitudes are not natural—particularly towards those who aren’t family. It’s easy to see why this should be the case inside the church (unity is impossible to maintain where pride and selfishness are given free rein). But why should we strive to be this way outside the church as well?

Again, one of the defining questions of these chapters is, What should a Christian look like? And the answer’s obvious: we should look like Jesus! That’s why he chose us, that’s why he saved us, Paul said in chapter 8—that we might be conformed to the image of Christ. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” Jesus told us in Matthew 28. But I’ve met multiple people who’ve said they don’t want to even listen to the gospel, because they’ve met Christians.

But what Paul describes here is exactly how Jesus himself lived, because Jesus saw them as people, created in the image of God—he was the one who created those people in his image, so he cared for them as people made in his image.

Love and Obedience with Our Enemies (v. 17-21)

So this is how we act towards all people. But Paul clearly feels the need to be more specific when it comes to the Christian’s interaction with those who could be considered his “enemies.”

V. 17:

17 Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

So already Paul is setting the stage for what comes next. There’s a reason why it feels good to watch a movie like Kill Bill: it feels good to see someone who’s been wronged get revenge against those who wronged them. It feels like justice.

But vengeance is not true justice, and it’s not our job. Simply put, our job is to act honorably and peacefully, not matter how much revenge feels more right.

Now of course Paul is talking about personal vengeance—he’s not talking about justice handed down by the governing authorities (he’ll address that in the passage we’ll see next week), and he’s not saying we should let someone who is hurting others continue to do so: we should take steps to prevent someone dangerous from harming others.

He’s speaking about our personal efforts to inflict what was inflicted upon us. It gives us the impression of justice, but this “justice” is actually vengeance wearing a mask, and vengeance is not our job.

What Paul says here is a very practical explanation of what it looks like to love our enemies, as Jesus told us (Matthew 5.43-44). Paul gives us some insight here as to why Jesus said this. In these verses we see that love for our enemies, love for those who wrong or persecute us, accomplishes two specific things.

Firstly, love for our enemies teaches us to trust God. V. 19 again:

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”

I love that Paul doesn’t say we have no reason to feel anger towards our enemies. We do, and that anger is often right. But we don’t know how to handle it. We don’t know how to wield our anger appropriately.

We always talk about Jesus getting angry in the temple as an example of why anger isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That’s true…but I’m not Jesus. I don’t know how to do that without sinning. If I let myself try to imitate Jesus here, I’ll inevitably end up hating the object of my anger. I’ll end up becoming bitter and obsessive about the wrongs committed against me.

Here’s the good news: God is angry enough for all of us. He will exact vengeance against the guilty; he will repay. We don’t need to carry that load. It’s normal to be angry, but we don’t have to act on that anger. We can leave it in God’s hands, and trust that his anger against sin will come out—either against Christ on the cross or against those who continue to reject God. We can let it go.

Secondly, love for our enemies defeats evil. V. 20:

To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.”

Now if you read this and thought this is strange, you’re not alone. Heap burning coals on his head? It’s almost like he’s prescribing a kind of passive-aggressive vengeance. This is actually a quote from Proverbs 25.21-22, but still: it seems like the motivation might be a bit off-kilter.

But there are two things at work behind this idea, I think. The first is simply that it’s the right thing to do—it’s what Jesus told his disciples to do, and it’s what he did himself, when he healed the ear of the guard who came to arrest him (Luke 22.51). But that doesn’t answer the question of what effect this is really meant to have on the enemy: what purpose the “burning coals on his head” serve if not to punish him.

Every parent has had this experience. You’re exhausted and irritable, and one of your kids gets on your nerves. You snap at them, you’re short with them, you’re unfair towards them—and they’re obviously hurt. They leave, and you keep doing whatever you were doing, feeling vindicated. Then a short time later, the kid comes back a little nervously…and gives you a hug, kisses you on the cheek.

In that moment, you feel miserable. You ask yourself how you could ever bring yourself to hurt this little person who, despite being annoying sometimes, loves you more than anything. If you’re a good parent, that’s when you ask for forgiveness, and the hug gets tighter.

Obviously it’s a different situation—there probably won’t be a lot of hugs and kisses with an enemy—but the idea is the same. Kindness in the face of persecution is so incongruous that it forces the persecutor to examine himself. Perhaps he’ll ignore what he sees, but there will be a moment when he has to see that what he is doing is wrong. Loving our enemies forces them to confront their sin.

You see, Paul is not telling us to be pushovers. He is telling us to choose a different fight. V. 21:

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Inevitably, choosing to love our enemies will feel weak. It will feel like stepping down. But this is wartime language; this is the battlefield strategy of the kingdom of God—overcome evil. Don’t let it take you; fight it. But fight it with good. The battlefield strategy of the kingdom of God is love for our enemies, goodness towards them instead of retribution, which takes bravery, because it requires us to run the risk of seeming weak.

Whatever happens when we love them—whatever comes of that moment of self-examination—is not up to us. If they persist, all they do is amass more of God’s judgment against themselves. But God has used far less to bring people to him. How beautiful would it be to gain a brother or a sister in this way?

Conclusion

Inside the church, amongst ourselves, God’s call on us is very high. Sincere and brotherly love, a passion for holiness, a desire to honor one another, firm hope, patience in pain, joyful sacrifice for one another.

And outside the church, God’s call on us is very high. Humility when we want to be seen as self-sufficient, empathy even when it’s inconvenient, and love for those who persecute us, rather than retribution.

How is it possible? We have seen the love of God for us in Christ. And we want to keep seeing it. So we present ourselves to God as a sacrifice, and we let him transform us. We conform ourselves to him, rather than the world, and we become as he is, we love as he loves. Every time we see ourselves, or a brother or a sister, taking on the character of Christ when it is so unnatural, we are seeing Christ’s miraculous work manifested again, right before our eyes. And we want the world to see it too.

This is what Jesus meant when he said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13.35).

In the light of his love for us, it is the only reasonable response.

Reasonable Sacrifices

Romans 12.1-8

Last week we did an overview of the first eleven chapters of Paul’s letter to the Romans. These chapters are almost entirely dedicated to explaining the incredible work of God for us.

To put it simply, Romans 1-11 explain the gospel to us, more deeply and more fully than perhaps anywhere else in the Bible. The gospel, as we saw, is the revelation of God’s righteousness, and Paul highlights four essential things that God’s righteousness accomplishes.

God’s righteousness judges and punishes man’s rebellion against him—man’s sin. At the same time, God’s righteousness saves sinners, through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us: he takes our place, he takes our sin, and gives us his perfect righteousness. In this way, God’s righteousness gives us hope: it reminds us that God’s saving work in Christ is unbreakable, and that nothing can separate us from his love for us in Christ. Lastly, we saw that God’s righteousness applies to all peoples—not only God’s chosen people under the old covenant, in the Old Testament, the people of Israel, but the Gentiles as well. His righteousness now applies to people from all nations, all tribes, all backgrounds, all cultures, all the world.

To put it a little more simply: we are all in the same situation; we all deserve the same condemnation for our rebellion against God; but even so, all those who place their faith in Christ have received the same grace.

Logical Sacrifices (v. 1-2)

This is a letter; it wasn’t meant to be cut up into little pieces the way we have to do if we preach it. It was meant to be read all at once, and that’s the only way to really feel the weight of the truths Paul laid out in the first eleven chapters. He just piles on good news after good news after good news, and by the time we arrive at chapter 12, our heads are almost spinning by the beauty and the immensity of God’s plan.

And that feeling of being overwhelmed by God’s grace and the genius of his plan is essential for everything that follows, because he’s going to ask a lot of us in response to this grace. But if we know all that God has done for us, it doesn’t feel like a lot; it feels like the only response that makes any sense. That’s the actual meaning behind the word “spiritual” in v. 1—in Greek it’s the word “logikos,” from which we obviously get our word “logical”: there is only one reasonable, logical response to God’s grace. V. 1:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

What is the only proper response to the incredible grace Paul’s just spilled so much ink describing? It is that we present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. We may have a hard time with this word “sacrifice”—it’s an Old Testament image that may not speak to us as much today. A “sacrifice” is something that is given to God as an act of worship, or dedicated to his service. The idea of sacrifice always implies loss (because you are letting go of something that is personally costly to you), and always implies thankfulness (because you are giving something to God in recognition of something he has done or will do, like forgiveness of sin).

Now, when Paul says this, he gives a few qualifiers. First, he says, I appeal to you therefore brothers, by the mercies of God. We offer ourselves as a sacrifice to God because of the mercies we have received from God.

Secondly, he describes this sacrifice: living, holy and acceptable to God. Because we have been made alive by the Spirit, we will learn what he expects of his people (which is the whole point, as he said in 8.29: God predestined us to be conformed to the image of Christ), and we actually do become conformed to Christ’s image.

Thirdly—and here’s the most surprising part of this—he doesn’t call us to present our hearts as a sacrifice, or our souls, but our bodies. We often tend to separate our lives into two quadrants: “my Christian life,” and “everything else”. The “everything else” is often mundane and ordinary, things like shopping and eating and watching Netflix—stuff we do with our bodies—while the “Christian life” stuff is more spiritual: things like meditation and prayer and Scripture reading.

What Paul says here is that there is no spiritual worship without bodily worship. There is no spiritual holiness without bodily holiness. To put it another way, if what we say in our prayers, if what we sing in our songs, does not correspond to the things we do with our bodies, there’s a problem.

Now, we shouldn’t absolutize what I just said—Paul knows we’re not perfect, he knows we’re still struggling to live for God, he said it really clearly in chapter 7—but this should be the trajectory of our lives.

This is what worship is—it’s not what just what happens on Sunday morning. Worship is what we do with our lives in response to God’s grace to us: it is giving ourselves wholly to him, because after all he’s done for us, how could we possibly do anything else?

Now, what does it mean? What does this sacrifice look like? Paul gives a kind of summary statement in v. 2:

2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Do not be conformed to this world—again, we are to be conformed to the image of Christ, not the world around us—but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Again, this is surprising. Because he doesn’t say to be transformed by the renewal of your heart, or your soul, but your mind. This is not spiritual language, but “body” language. It’s what happens in our brains, the way we think about things, the way we see things.

The point is that the transformation that takes place in the Christian is holistic—it is not compartmentalized. When we give ourselves to God, we give everything to him—all of ourselves, warts and all. When we realize that we belong wholly to God—everything we are—we learn to see things differently.

We need to be careful with this verse, because we can fall into the trap of waiting for the Holy Spirit to come and give us a kind of mind-transfusion, like Neo in The Matrix learning kung fu in five seconds because a guy pushed a button. We tend to hyper-spiritualize what Paul is saying here, when in fact I think he’s getting at something very simple and logical.

Let me give you a very un-spiritual example. I’ve been a coffee drinker since I was 15. At least three a day—often two in the morning, one in the afternoon. I love coffee.

But experience has taught me that it’s hard on my stomach. So this summer, I decided to try an experiment. I switched to tea for a week. No coffee, for a week. Now, I drank a lot of tea that first week to compensate for the low caffeine. But although I did miss the taste of coffee, I very quickly realized that I felt better when I didn’t drink it. So I kept going.

It’s been about a month now, and I’ve had the occasional coffee here and there (maybe four or five in the last month). But in general, I’ve been drinking almost nothing but tea for a month.

And to my great surprise, I love it. I feel better. Through experience, I’ve learned that it’s better for me.

It sounds silly, but this is how we are progressively transformed. God brings us from death to life by his Spirit, he gives us saving faith in him, and we place our faith in Christ. In response to the gospel, we commit ourselves to God, completely. We learn from his Word and from our brothers and sisters what he expects of us, and we do it, even if it’s difficult. And over time, we come to experience that God actually knows what he’s talking about. So we start seeing things differently: we start seeing sin as something that is undesirable, and holiness as something we want. (And obedience is far easier when we want it.)

By testing (Gk. δοκιμάζω, to test, to scrutinize) we learn to recognize God’s will—what is good and acceptable and perfect. Not primarily his will for our professions or for our choice of spouse or for where we live, but his will for his people—his will for our character.

Now, do you see what is happening in this commandment? Remember what Paul said in chapter 1? Starting at the end of v. 20:

So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools… 28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

The renewal of the mind that Paul describes here in chapter 12 is a reversal of what characterized our minds and hearts before God saved us. Those who have been saved by God are transformed by the renewal of their minds, to become able to see what God’s will is, and to walk in step with God’s will.

The crazy thing about all of this is that Paul is taking terms which are usually used in the context of the regular gathering of God’s people, either in the temple or in church (sacrifice, worship, etc.), and applying these terms to all of life. In other words, the Christian’s true worship doesn’t happen here, in church—or at least, not only here. It happens everywhere, every day, every moment, in every situation.

Because you have received this grace, give yourself wholly to God, and be transformed.

Okay, very good—what does that mean? What does it look like for Christians to give their bodies as sacrifices to God, and to be transformed into the image of Christ?

This is what we’ll be exploring for the next several weeks. And we’ll see the first two areas to which it applies after the break.

Humble Sacrifices (v. 3)

So because of God’s incredible grace and mercy to us, we are called to present our bodies as living sacrifices to him—everything we have, everything we are. Transformed progressively from top to bottom, we give ourselves wholly to him. What does that look like?

The first mark of God’s salvation in the life of the believer—not chronologically, but the first that Paul mentions here—is a realistic and humble estimation of ourselves.

V. 3:

3 For by the grace given to me—

(Again, we shouldn’t miss the “for” here—it’s sort of like the “therefore” in v. 1: he’s linking what he’s saying now to what he just said in v. 1-2.)

3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.

We mustn’t miss that his first commandment here concerns the way we think about ourselves, which is of course directly related to what he said just before, in v. 2, about our transformation by the renewal of our minds, our discernment. When we are transformed by God’s grace, the first thing to change is the way that we think of ourselves.

Now, it might help to remember the context here. The church in Rome is a multi-ethnic church: there are Christians of Jewish origin, and Christians of non-Jewish origin. And while we have no indication that there was conflict in this church, there were certainly some areas of tension, as we saw a lot in the earlier chapters. The Jews might have a tendency to look down on the Gentiles, and vice versa, because of what they do or don’t think is necessary to be acceptable to God.

So Paul calls them to see themselves rightly, with humility, to realize that they are all individual members of a single, unified body. Knowing that they belong to a body, that they are not self-sufficient, should give them the humility to recognize that they need the other members of the body.

Paul’s going to apply this to the gifts we bring to bear on the body in a minute, but first he says something that can sometimes be scary: he tells us to think with humility, with sober judgment about ourselves, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. What does this mean?

Simply put, it means that even though God has given us faith in Christ, the faith that saved us, that faith isn’t static. It grows over time. How many times did Jesus call his disciples “O you of little faith” (cf. Matthew 8.26, for example)? And to the woman who came to him asking to be healed, who persisted even though Jesus initially seemed to brush her off, he said, “Woman, your faith is great!” (Matthew 15.28).

Paul tells the Romans to think of themselves with humility, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned, because he knows we all naturally have a tendency to measure our worth according to our gifts—if we’re good at what we’re do, we think we’re valuable. If we don’t think we’re good at anything, we feel worthless.

But Paul flips this tendency on its head, by telling us to measure ourselves, not according to our gifts, but according to our faith. It might seem like we could fall into the same trap, but that’s not the case. Why? Because if we measure ourselves according to the faith God has assigned us, we will immediately recognize that whatever faith we have didn’t come from us, but from God.

If we measure ourselves according to our faith, pride will disappear, because our measure of faith has nothing to do with our worth, but rather with what God wishes to do through us TODAY. Certain acts of obedience require massive faith, while others require less. And God gives us exactly what we need, at exactly the right time. The measure of faith God has given us has nothing to do with our worth, and everything to do with what God wishes to do through us today.

And thank God that tomorrow, our faith will be greater than it is today. When we are faithful over the little he has given us today, he gives us more to do tomorrow—and he gives us the faith necessary to do it. All he calls us to do is dedicate ourselves wholly to what he has given me today, and trust that he has given us the faith we need to do it.

Equipped Sacrifices (v. 3-8)

Which brings us to the next command. Presenting our bodies as living sacrifices to God will manifest itself in a whole-hearted dedication to serving the body of Christ, through the gifts God has given us.

4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

So this isn’t hard to understand, but it’s often hard to rightly put into practice.

Paul gives this image of "one body” in v. 4-5: we are like a body with many members, each member serving its own specific purpose. He fleshes this image out more in 1 Corinthians 12, with a similar goal in mind: each member of the body serves its particular function, for the good of the whole.

Then in v. 6-8, Paul gives a list of a few particular gifts and how we should go about using them to serve the body.

Some speak the Word of God for the good of the body. Paul mentions prophecy first, and I won’t get into all the different opinions on what this means, because his point isn’t what prophecy is, but how it’s used. The point is, some bring the Bible to bear on the body: prophecy, teaching, exhortation—these all fall under this category.

Some serve in concrete and very practical ways: giving, or serving—the root of this word is the same as for “deacon”.

Some lead—they direct the body; this would be one function of the elders, for example.

And some perform acts of mercy (these can vary wildly: something as simple as spending time with someone who’s going through a hard time, listening to them and praying with them, is an act of mercy).

I won’t analyze these gifts, because this list isn’t exhaustive, and because the specific gifts he mentions here isn’t the point. He gives seven examples to represent all the possible gifts. He makes no judgment of importance in talking about these gifts, even though some of them are high-profile, very visible (like teaching or leading) and others might go totally unnoticed (like serving). Paul makes no distinction in terms of importance between what the pastor does and what the person who helps set up tables before lunch does. They are both exercising a gift—even if that gift is simple willingness to do something no one else wants to do—and their service is valuable to the body.

Now we need to be honest: any talk of “gifts” or “spiritual gifts” very often becomes self-centered. We examine ourselves and our gifts and start to compare ourselves to others, finding ourselves more or less useful to the body of Christ than others. It’s what we saw earlier: one of the most damaging traps a Christian can fall into—and one of the most common—is to determine their value by their gifts.

Paul wants us to see that one way we present our bodies as a living, holy and acceptable sacrifice to God is by using whatever gifts he has given us, to the absolute best of our ability, in the service of the body of Christ. That’s the point he’s trying to make here; it’s not about any particular gift—it’s about how we’re using that gift, and why.

We have gifts to serve the body, not to serve ourselves. So the number or flashiness of our gifts means absolutely nothing in relation to who we are as children of God. This command counters the tendency to be puffed up with pride because we have a gift that’s more visible than others, and the tendency to be filled with despair because we feel our gifts are pitiful. This is a command that calls us to a realistic estimation of what we bring to the table: “See how you in particular can serve, and do it.”

So how might we do that? How do we know what we bring to the table?

In the past several people have asked me when we’ll give a teaching on how to discover your gifts. My answer is simple: probably never.

There are a couple of reasons why we won’t go in that direction, unless we come across an exceptional reason to do so. The first is that there is absolutely no biblical foundation for how to “discover” your gifts. You’ll never find instructions on that in a single passage of the Bible. So while those seminars on “discovering your spiritual gifts” are not necessarily bad, they’re not biblical either.

The second reason is a lot simpler: it assumes that a so-called “spiritual gift” is inherently different from any other gift we have. What is a gift, in the context of this conversation? It is something that our Creator has enabled us to do well. How do we, as ordinary human beings, figure out what we’re good at? We do stuff. We play when we’re kids, we try things, we get interested in something and we find out—sometimes to our surprise—that we’re actually good at that thing.

Now, you may not know exactly what you’re good at, what gifts you have that would serve the church. So how do you find out?

You look around and see what needs there are, and you work to fill that need. They need help on the welcome team? Offer to help. People are setting up tables? Give them a hand. You see someone sitting alone? Go talk to them. Someone’s discouraged? Pray with them.

You won’t be good at everything you put your hand to, but I promise you, if you allow your focus to become how you can serve your brothers and sisters, instead of “What is my gift?”, you will find out what your gifts are. Or others will see it, and they’ll tell you.

There’s no big mystery here. Paul is saying is, whatever God has enabled you to do, do it to the best of your ability, according to the grace and the opportunities God has given you, and do it humbly, willingly, diligently, generously and joyfully.

You don’t need to be exactly like anyone else in order to usefully serve the church. God put you where you are for a reason, and he is calling you to use the person you are to serve the church in a way that only you can.

If you feel like your gifts are exceptional today, and vital to the church, think of yourself soberly. Don’t just examine your gifts; examine your faith, and serve wisely. Don’t think highly of yourself, but recognize that your gifts and your faith come from God, not from you. It’s not about you; it’s about the church. So by God’s grace, do the best you can with what he’s given you, and trust him to build his church.

If you feel like your faith is small today, if you feel like your gifts are small today, don’t be discouraged. Don’t just examine your gifts, examine your faith, and serve wisely: by God’s grace, do the best you can with what he’s given you, and trust him to make you grow, and to build his church through you.

Conclusion

Think of what it must have been like for the church in Rome: Phoebe (to whom we’ll be formally introduced in chapter 16) shows up with this letter from Paul. The entire church gathers to find out what it says. Someone—likely Phoebe herself, since it was often the courier who did this—reads the letter aloud. The Jewish and the Gentile Christians begin hearing who they were, what God has made of them, who they are now. It’s like a series of waves, each one bigger than the last: You thought God was good? He’s even better than you thought. Oh, and you think that’s good? Yeah, he’s even better than that.

Over and over, for an hour, the cumulative effect of all these implications of God’s grace—this breathtaking realization of the abundance of God’s riches to them in Christ—must have been overwhelming.

Then they begin this passage, and a shift occurs:

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

This is a very high command—perhaps even the ultimate command. God calls his people to give everything they are to him, as an act of worship.

But after the abundance of God’s grace to them, what possible response could they have had, other than: “Of course!”?

This is why our obedience is often flawed: because a lot of Christians today obey from a mindset that assumes their resources are limited. If we feel like our resources are limited, we will naturally try to keep what we have: we will be stingy with our time, with our finances, with our gifts, and even with our love. Sacrifice will seem impossible, because if I give this up, what else do I have?

But if we truly believe God’s grace is what Paul says it is, if we believe his grace flows from an unending spring, that his grace really is that abundant, sacrifice—even the sacrifice of everything we are—not only feels possible, but reasonable. If we believe that God’s grace to us is truly this abundant, we will serve freely, we will sacrifice freely, because there’s always more to spare: in the long run, in the light of eternity, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Paul is going to continue, and give us more examples of how we do this. But he starts where the church in Rome would have been—where we are today. He starts with the brothers and sisters to whom we have been united in Christ into one body, and he tells us to give everything we are to God, and to dedicate ourselves to the service of that body.

So what do we have to bring to the table? Not only in terms of ability and talents, but in terms of faith and willingness? Do we want to love each other well? There are as many needs in this church as there are people, and most of those needs are profoundly personal and relational. The only way to meet them is to be present, to keep our eyes open, and to use whatever God has given us, whoever God has made us, to serve one another.

It’s a sacrifice, for sure—but compared to the riches of God’s grace to us, it’s nothing. The sacrifice of all we are is a sacrifice we can spare, because Christ is more than enough for us.

The Righteousness of God

(Romans 1-11)

We have a lot to do today, so I’m going to jump right into it. If you were here last year, you know that all last year we were in Paul’s letter to the Romans, and we finished the book through chapter 11 (out of 16). Next week we’ll be jumping back into the letter at chapter 12.

But if you’re joining us for the first time, that means you missed the first eleven chapters of this letter. And even if you were here last year, it’s been over two months since we were in this book. That’s a long time.

So here’s what we’re going to do today… We’re going to do an overview of the first eleven chapters of the book of Romans. I know that seems like a tall order, and it is, but it may not be as complex as it seems, because for all its theological depth, Romans is a remarkably coherent letter. It has a very consistent and contained message that is simply applied in unparalleled theological depth to a specific situation.

So I’m going to give a quick reminder of the situation in which this letter was written, in order to get a grip on the context, and then we’ll dive in. I won’t read every passage, obviously, but as we dip in I’ll read a selection of passages that should, hopefully, give us a feel for the letter so far. Of course this won’t even come close to really covering everything Paul says, so I would encourage you to read Romans 1 through 11 this week (if you didn’t already do it in your community groups), and if you’re interested in any specific portions of it, all of the twenty-eight sermons we did on chapters 1 through 11 are available on the church’s website.

Context

But first, a bit of context.

When Paul writes this letter, it’s been a little more than twenty years since the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Christian church is gaining traction all over the Roman empire; churches are being planted all over the place, and more and more people are coming to faith in Christ.

This same thing, of course, is happening in the city of Rome itself.

We know that the apostle Paul didn’t plant this church; he likely doesn’t know anyone there personally. He’s hoping to go there soon, on his way to Spain, but first he needs to go to Jerusalem to deliver money that he had collected for that church (cf. Rom. 15.19-32, Acts 19.21). Paul likely sent this letter to the church in Rome in the care of a woman named Phoebe, whom we’ll meet at the end of the book, as a way of introducing himself and his ministry, so that they would support him in his work in Spain.

We also know that this church was composed of both Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. At the root of their particular challenges was their multicultural nature.

The Roman church was probably a Jewish church at first: Jews were converted to Christianity, and began meeting in homes, and more and more people joined them, until finally, they had a church. And of course, because this was Rome and it was mostly Gentiles around, Gentiles began to come to faith in Christ as well, and joined the church.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Around A.D. 49, the emperor Claudius exiled the Jews from Rome, because of strife stemming from Christianity (we see as much in Acts 18.2). So all the Jews had to leave. But the Gentile Christians were able to stay and keep the church going during that time.

So for around five years, the church in Rome was likely an exclusively Gentile church. But then, when Claudius died in A.D. 54, the Jews were allowed to return to Rome. So suddenly these Jewish Christians were thrust back together with the Gentile Christians who had been running the church in their absence, and significant questions about how to do things arose—mostly questions about how to live together as Christians who were both Jewish and non-Jewish.

This context (along with other, socioeconomic factors) would have produced a lot of questions. Can we be in good standing with God by obeying the Law of Moses? What does the salvation of Gentiles mean for the future of the Jews as God’s people? Should the Gentiles observe the Law of Moses like the Jewish Christians do?

Paul treats all of these questions and many more; he uses them as a springboard to expose the essential elements of the gospel he preaches.

1. The gospel is the revelation of God’s righteousness (1.1-17).

And he begins his letter with a kind of summary statement of what that gospel actually proclaims, what it shows—so that’s where we’ll start. I have five points today, five central truths that Paul lays out in chapters 1 through 11.

The first is quick, because it’s the statement Paul will flesh out in the rest of the letter, and it is simple: the gospel is the revelation of God’s righteousness. Romans 1.16-17:

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

This term “righteousness” is a tricky one to define, because it can include a lot of different realities depending on the context. God’s righteousness is, first of all, his perfect moral character—in God, there is no sin, no deception, no injustice. He is perfectly holy, perfectly just, perfectly “righteous.” This creates a problem for us, because we, human beings, are not perfectly righteous—we are inconsistent, unholy, unjust.

So the second layer to God’s righteousness—and the primary one for this letter—is that God’s righteousness is not only his own moral character; it is what God has done to save sinners while still upholding the standards of his holy nature. Simply put, it should not be possible for a holy God to save sinners, because letting sinners go unpunished for their sin is—or should be, by our way of thinking—inherently unjust. But that’s exactly what he did: he found a way to both punish sin and save sinners.

And that’s what Paul’s going to explain a little later. The fact that God did that, and the way that God did that, is told in the gospel. The gospel is the revelation of God’s righteousness.

2. God’s righteousness judges sin (1.18-3.20)

For the first eleven chapters of the letter, Paul is going to explain that righteousness in great detail, by giving us an account of several things God’s righteousness accomplishes. And the first thing we see is that God’s righteousness judges sin.

Paul starts in chapter 1 by showing us that humanity, in its totality, has rejected God. Romans 1.18-20:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.

Although we see the world that God created, and we see his attributes clearly manifested in creation, we do not acknowledge him or worship him as God.

So what does God do? He gives us up to our sin. He lets us be the sinners we are.

At least, this is how things go naturally. This is what we naturally want, and this is what we deserve. And Paul wants to really insist on this point, because the Jews and Gentiles in the church in Rome will both have a tendency to hear Paul talk about God judging sin, and side-eye the other group sitting on the other side of the room: “Did you hear that, Jews? He’s talking about you.” “Did you hear that, Gentiles? He’s talking about you.”

But no—Paul is clear that he’s talking about everyone: those Jews who adhere to the law of Moses (the Jewish law, the means by which they were made “right” before God), and those Gentiles who don’t. No one is righteous, he says in chapter 3, verse 10, quoting Psalm 14—no one has ever managed to be righteous on their own, or by means of their own obedience to any standard. No one is that obedient.

This is why the law of Moses can’t save the Jews—it’s not that the law is bad; Paul insists that the law good. But human beings are unable to keep the law. So the law ends up condemning them instead of saving them. That’s what he means in 3.19-20, when he says,

19 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. 20 For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

When human beings stand up next to God’s standard of holiness—which up to this point had been revealed in the law of Moses—we always find ourselves lacking. God’s righteousness means anger against our sin, and that anger is right—it is just—it is righteous. His righteousness judges sin, and no human being can stand up to it.

3. God’s righteousness saves sinners (3.21-4.25).

But that’s not the end of the story; God’s righteousness doesn’t just judge sin; it saves sinners. 3.21:

21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

So this is the unexpected aspect of God’s righteousness; it’s the thing none of us ever could have predicted. This is why for the first four hundred years of the Christian church, they were concentrated almost entirely on this question: how does a righteous God save people who have sinned and fallen short of his glory?

There’s a scene in the film Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne tries to disappear in a bad part of Gotham City. But he can’t do it, because he’s walking around in a $3,000 coat. So what does he do? He offers to trade coats with a homeless guy on the street—he takes the man’s filthy, ratty coat and puts it on, and gives the man his pristine, warm, expensive coat.

Imagine our lives—and Christ’s life—like coats. What Christ did was essentially trade coats with us. He took our dirty, torn coats—rendered useless because of our rebellion against God—and put it on, and he gave us his absolutely perfect and beautiful coat, and put it on us. So when he presented himself before God, God looks at his coat, and identifies him as the criminal who usually wears it, and punishes him; and when he looks at the coat we’re wearing, he recognizes that the coat belongs to his Son, and he rewards us as sons and daughters.

God justifies us—that is, he declares us righteous—by his grace as a gift. How can he do this? Because he put Jesus Christ forward as a “propitiation” by his blood. The word “propitiation” means something that satisfies God’s divine wrath. So he didn’t just push our sin aside; Christ took our sin on himself, and God actually punished our sin in Christ.

Often we say that Christ “paid our debt,” the debt we owed because of our sin. And that’s true; but it’s much more than that. He didn’t just pay our debt. He took our place. In a very real way, he became us; he became our sin (cf. 2 Corinthians 5.21); he became the very thing that God hates. So God, being just, poured out all of his righteous anger against our sin, down to the last drop, by punishing Christ on the cross.

So you see, he didn’t just wipe our sin away. He burned it up. He punished it to the fullest extent of his power. It’s impossible for us to understand the depth of Christ’s suffering for us.

But that’s only half of it. God didn’t just take our sin away by punishing Christ for it; in exchange for our sin, he gave us the perfect, sinless life that Christ lived for us. So it’s not only that he doesn’t consider us sinners any longer; it’s that when he looks at us, he sees the righteousness of Christ which was given to us, and so considers us righteous.

All of this happens as a free gift, that we take hold of by faith. When we see the depth of Christ’s sacrifice, it becomes quickly obvious that we can’t do anything to add to it, or subtract from it. All of our effort is like a drop of water in the ocean. Christ’s gift is so monumental that all we can do is receive it by faith.

And Paul goes on, in chapter 4, to explain that it has always been this way. Even before Christ, human beings were not made right before God by their obedience, but by faith. He gives the example of Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, and he references the Old Testament, showing how Abraham was declared righteous by faith, and not by obedience.

The point of this is, it is not our own obedience that saves us; it is only God’s grace in Christ, which we receive by faith.

4. God’s righteousness gives us hope (5.1-8.39).

So God reveals his righteousness in the gospel; God’s righteousness judges sin; God’s righteousness saves sinners. Next (and this is a big one), God’s righteousness gives us hope.

I really wish we had time to go back through all of chapters 5 through 8, which are among my favorite passages in all of Scripture. In chapter 5, Paul brings everything he’s said so far to this shattering truth—this work of Christ actually does work. 5.1:

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

To put it simply, knowing we have peace with God through Christ, knowing that God no longer holds our sin against us, changes us. It changes what we want, and it changes how we live.

And that’s where he goes in chapter 6. It may be tempting for us to imagine that somehow God’s grace will apply to some people but not others. We look around and see people whom we would consider “good people,” and we think, “Well of course God’s grace applies to her—she’s awesome. I’m not awesome. You don’t know what I’ve done, or what I’ve thought, or how often I’ve rejected God.”

But no—Paul spends the last half of chapter 5 showing how completely Christ triumphed over sin, and then he applies that work to everyone who has placed their faith in him, by showing that his grace is more powerful than sin. Chapter 6, verse 5:

5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. 6 We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. 7 For one who has died has been set free from sin. 8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. 9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. 11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

So there is a mental commandment here that he’s going to flesh out in chapter 7: consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

In other words, the reality is that we are no longer sinners: we have been declared righteous by God through faith in Christ. “Righteous” is what God says about us; that’s what he calls us. If there was a stamp on our spiritual birth certificates, “righteous” is what it would say about us.

But we see that in practice, we’re not all that righteous yet. We still have struggles, we still have moments—or even periods—of disobedience. And Paul’s saying, “Don’t let your practice define your identity. Let your identity—what God says about you—determine your practice.”

But Paul knows that this is hard to do—even more, it’s hard to believe. Why? Because even though Christ has changed our hearts and our desires through faith, the one thing he hasn’t changed yet is our bodies, which are still used to sinning. Anyone who’s tried to quit smoking, or to stop biting their nails, knows that habits are incredibly hard to break. And the deeper the habit, the harder it is to break.

So because we struggle to stop sinning, it’s easy to assume that we’re doing something wrong. Paul identifies the difficulty of this struggle in the second half of chapter 7. Romans 7.14:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. 15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. 17 So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

I love that he said it like this, because there is not a single Christian who has ever lived who doesn’t identify with the self-questioning he expresses here. How can I believe that I am no longer a sinner when I see sin in me?

This is why he gives the command in chapter 6, v. 11: consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ. If we look at the practice of our lives, we will instantly become discouraged, because we’ll see everything in us that still needs changing: all of the sinful habits our bodies have still not managed to shake.

That is why he reminds us at the beginning of chapter 8:

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

So you see, he points us back to Christ: if we look to what Christ has done, instead of at our own inadequacies, we will remember that we couldn’t save ourselves, and we can’t save ourselves now. We need him. We need the work of Christ, and we need the work of his Spirit to apply the work of Christ to us.

Here’s Paul’s logic (and it is ironclad): if Christ did all of that to save us, he won’t stop with the job halfway done. If he began this work in us, he will finish it. There is no condemnation for us if we are in Christ; the Spirit has set us free from the condemnation of sin. And so if he began that work, he will finish it. Chapter 8, v. 11:

11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

If he saved us, he will make us holy. If he saved us, he will enable us to put our sin to death. And if you’ve been a Christian for any amount of time, you can see it. We can all point to all the ways we are still far from the mark. But with a little effort, we can also look back at our lives and see how we have changed since we came to faith. We can see progression. We can see what God has done in us.

If he started this work, he won’t stop. If the Spirit raised Christ from the dead, and he lives in us, then he will give life—not to our souls, not to our hearts, but to our bodies: these weak bodies still under sin’s influence. He will make us grow in him.

Knowing that this doesn’t depend on us, but on him, is what gives us hope—and that is how Paul ends chapter 8, starting in v. 31:

31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;

we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

5. God’s righteousness applies to all peoples (9.1-11.36).

There’s one last piece that we need to see, but to understand it we need to come back to the context of the church in Rome. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians, living together in a body of believers. The Jewish Christians in the church are undoubtedly rejoicing about the hope they have in Christ, as well they should. But at the same time, they're also thinking, “But what about my Jewish family and friends who aren’t Christians? God said the Jews were his chosen people. Does salvation in Christ mean that God has rejected his chosen people?”

That’s what Paul explains next, by showing how God’s righteousness applies to all peoples—both to Jews and to Gentiles.

The first thing he does is to show that God has not rejected Israel. Chapter 9, v. 6:

6 But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, 7 and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” 8 This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.

To put this simply: from the very beginning, God said this was how things would work. God never said that being born a Jew automatically meant that you were a child of God. He already explained this in chapter 5: even Abraham was not saved because he was of a particular ethnicity, but because he had faith in God. The “children of the promise” are those who share in Abraham’s faith, not Abraham’s blood.

God paved the way for Israel to have that faith, and many of them did. But not all. If any member of the people of Israel is not saved, it’s not because God has rejected his people, but because that person has rejected God.

This is what he spends chapters 9 and 10 explaining: Israel, collectively, has rejected God, but God has not rejected them. He has chosen a remnant—a certain number of Israelites who would believe in the Savior whom God promised to send, Jesus Christ.

Then, in chapter 11, he turns to the Gentiles—how are they a part of this salvation?

Paul describes God’s plan as a huge tree, which he built out of the people of Israel. Those Israelites who rejected Christ—whom Paul describes as “branches”—are cut off, and the Gentiles who have accepted Christ—whom Paul describes as “wild olive shoots”—have been grafted in to the tree.

His point is this: neither the Jews nor the Gentiles have any reason to claim they are more legitimate as Christians because they are Jews, or because they are Gentiles.

In chapter 11, v. 17 (he’s speaking to the Gentiles now):

17 But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, 18 do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you. 19 Then you will say, “Branches were broken off so that I might be grafted in.” 20 That is true. They were broken off because of their unbelief, but you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear. 21 For if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will he spare you. 22 Note then the kindness and the severity of God: severity toward those who have fallen, but God’s kindness to you, provided you continue in his kindness. Otherwise you too will be cut off.

And here’s the great news: God has a plan—still mysterious, I admit—to redeem a great number of the Jews, and bring them back in to his salvation. V. 23:

23 And even they, if they do not continue in their unbelief, will be grafted in, for God has the power to graft them in again. 24 For if you were cut from what is by nature a wild olive tree, and grafted, contrary to nature, into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, the natural branches, be grafted back into their own olive tree.

Conclusion

This is all mind-blowing, of course, and we can struggle with thinking through how it all works for hours (as we did: we spent months talking about all of these things). But the central message is still the same: all of salvation is from God. The gospel is the manifestation of his righteousness: his righteousness which judges sin, which saves sinners, which assures us of the hope we have in him, and which applies to everyone who has faith in Christ, no matter who we are or where we come from.

That is why Paul ends with this magnificent doxology, starting in v. 33 of chapter 11:

33 Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

34  “For who has known the mind of the Lord,

or who has been his counselor?”

35  “Or who has given a gift to him

that he might be repaid?”

36 For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.

This letter could easily end there—honestly, Paul could have ended with chapter 8—and we would have more than we needed to get us through the rest of our lives.

But Paul does not stop there. Beginning in chapter 12, he’s going to take all of this and ask one simple question: Since these things are true, HOW SHOULD WE LIVE? What difference should these truths make in our lives, as individuals and as a church?

That is what he will spend the next five chapters answering, and that’s what we’ll begin exploring next week. But for now, I suggest we simply sit under these truths, and ask God to let them weigh on us. Let’s end today as Paul ends chapter 11: at simple amazement before the goodness and wisdom and grace of our God.