When I was in the Navy there was one thing you could count on doing constantly. It was the paint detail. While I was never on a ship I served in a number of hard places that were surrounded by the sea Italy, Bermuda, Key West and every surface was subject to corrosion from the salt air. Yes, there were times when we did paint detail just to keep us busy and out of trouble but, on the whole, it was necessary because of our environment. We added layers and layers of paint to surfaces that were painted over for years. There was never any arguing with the necessity of doing it. No one ever said, “I remember the good old days when everything here was fresh water and no need for constantly repainting.” There was never a sense of paranoia that the salt air was against us personally. It was just the nature of the environment and a relentless painting of exposed surfaces was the best prevention against the corrosive effects of the natural environment.
In a sense, that is where we are today. I had hesitated before deciding to teach Romans because I know all of you have been painted over with Romans many, many times. But then I realized we still live in a corrosive environment and Romans may be the best preventive we have for the “salt air” of distorted truth, bad theology, false wisdom, idolatry, perversion, indecency and forgetting God. As Paul says in this first chapter, “Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done.” That is the sea air in which we live and unless we have the discipline of constantly painting and repairing our minds and hearts with the knowledge of God we will become corrupt ourselves. There is no avoiding it so periodically we need to add another layer of insulation and protection from what surrounds us.
So, that is why we are going to spend the next few weeks in the book of Romans.
The book opens with Paul defining his relationship with Christ. He does not say he is a fan or even a follower. He is a servant a doulos of Christ. In verse 14 he says he is obligated to Greeks and nonGreeks, both to the wise and the foolish and that word “obligated” only underscores how he sees his relationship. He is not a volunteer or someone making a career of the Gospel. He is a conscript and his life is not his own. He did not sign up to make his life more satisfying or happy. He was drafted. He was captured and his life is no longer his own.
He goes on to establish his authority that comes out of his being a servant. That’s not how we normally think of authority. Servants don’t have authority but Paul does. And the source of that authority is not by virtue of his birth or training or his abilities or any credentials he might have. Rather, it is his being appointed directly by God and set apart for this service.
As we have seen throughout the book of Acts, Paul was routinely treated like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton by many in the early Church. They saw him as an imposter looking for attention and credibility. He was one always trying to force his way into the inner circle of the founders but then going too far and offending people. In Antioch he calls Peter a hypocrite and seems to imply that the brothers in Jerusalem think of themselves as more important than they are. He makes sure everyone knows that the Gospel he preaches was not passed on to him by anyone the founders included but that Jesus himself revealed it to him. On that basis he even considers himself an apostle equal to the others and that irritates more than a few. From the start they had their doubts and they are always testing him and looking for fault. His story of an encounter with the risen Jesus was suspect and his determination to go his own way was a cause of considerable strife among the leadership. He fought this his whole ministry. He was not the best preacher. He was not “the rock” like Peter. He was not the brother of Jesus like James. He was not “the one loved” by Jesus like John. He was an intruder and a disturbance much of the time. In fact, I think his contemporaries would be surprised by the esteem in which we hold him today.
That did not stop Paul. He was speaking for God. He was not simply offering commentary or keen insights. He was speaking God’s words. God chose him intentionally. While God could have said it himself like he delivered the Ten Commandments he wanted it said by Paul. “We are Christ’s ambassadors, as though God is making his appeal through us.” Many ambassador positions are now rewards for major donors without much being expected but Paul saw himself not as ornamental but a true speaker for God. We are not used to that or we have come to not trust those who make such claims. They are charlatans or celebrities taking advantage of simple people. In fact, some even believe God has become silent altogether and is finished speaking. Not Paul. God spoke through him.
Second, he describes his calling. He is called to the Gentiles. Paul is writing this letter from the city of Corinth and it was there that he says he is finally washing his hands of the Jews and is going to focus completely on the Gentiles. That is the open door to the Gospel. We’ve spent a good bit of time looking at the progression of that call in the book of Acts. He always began with speaking in the synagogue and almost every time was frustrated at their hardness to the Gospel or their outright violence in response to him. Over and over again he says he will go to the Gentiles and then in the next city he starts over again in the synagogue even in Rome at the end of his life but with the same negligible result ridicule and rejection. Later in the book we’ll see how he resolved that conflict but, for now, he is in the middle of his most frustrating time with the Jews in Corinth and is intent on going to the Gentiles only.
Was that a waste of several years? Why would God allow him to experience the failure and frustrations of doing the “wrong” thing for so many years? After all, isn’t doing God’s will supposed to be where things work and fall into place? That’s where we find the best college to attend, the job in which we are satisfied, the one we love and marry, the right place to live. It’s the place where we are content and things really click into place. How many times have we said about things that go our way, “It was a God thing”? How many times do we define God’s will by the things that make life easier and we have enormous trouble reconciling the difficult times or times of failure with God’s will other than saying to ourselves, “I wonder what God is teaching me?” I wonder why God in one of his periodic appearances to Paul didn’t say, “Paul, why are you wasting your time on these people? The real receptivity to the Gospel is the Gentiles so go spend your time with them. Go where the market is and where people are open. Otherwise, you are going to waste your life and your time on people who will not hear or see. Give it up.”
Was Paul out of God’s will because he was unsuccessful and made almost no progress for the Gospel in the one place that seemed the most obvious to him?
Do we have the same experiences? I think we come to our true calling as a process and not instantly. In fact, there are times when our true calling may be for a very short time of our lives and then we go back to the routine of life. We get “called up” to serve and then are released when our part is over. We may be prepared for years for one brief moment of contribution and that is it. That’s hard to accept when we are taught that our purpose is about creating a life that is satisfying, fulfilling, significant and blessed. Why would God prepare us, use us, and then return us instead of making our whole life one of growing success?
I don’t know but I do know that many, many leaders have experienced years of failure and rejections but then been called up for a particular moment. Moses lived a third of his life forty years tending sheep in the desert. Abraham Lincoln failed many times to be elected. James Michener, the author of Hawaii was rejected by publishers so many times he lost count. Winston Churchill was finished as a political figure and leader at the beginning of World War II. We don’t know when God will use us and from what desert or abandoned place he will call us for his purposes.
In Romans 15:20 Paul describes the central motivation that drives him. “It has always been my ambition to preach the Gospel where Christ was not known so that I would not be building on another’s foundation.” The word for ambition there is “philotimeo” or the love of that which is highly valued. It’s the word that describes the core value that drives everything else we do. It may be adventure, freedom, influence, relationships, power, love, knowledge, wealth or respect. The philotimeo is different for all of us but it is in the end the “true north” for our compass that thing to which we return all the time.
And that is what God will use your sanctified central ambition. It may take forty years, failure and rejection to get you there…but it will come in time.
Finally, Paul focuses on the power of the Gospel. He is saying, in a sense, “Rome and what it represents does not intimidate me. The Gospel is more powerful than Rome.”
Paul was not there to reform Rome or to make Rome into a Christian city. He had no interest in conquering Rome. He was confident in the silent and invisible power of the Gospel, the foolishness of the Cross and the fact of the resurrection of Christ as the first of many. He was confident in the power of quiet and responsible lives, believers who cared for each other and those around them, moral courage, integrity, generosity, honest labor, and loyalty to the name of Christ. Paul says, in effect, “I am confident in the power of time, sacrifice and changed lives to overcome in the end all other forms of power.” It is the power of the resurrection and not the power of reform or revolution.
In verse 5 Paul says, “Through him and for his name’s sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith.” Obedience that comes from faith is distinct from “faith alone” or “obedience alone”. The Christian life requires both faith and obedience. We live in the tension of obedience that comes from faith. Without obedience there is chaos but without faith there is only regulation at the expense of freedom. We hear a good deal of talk about our losing our roots as a Christian nation. As you know, I don’t believe in a Christian nation. However, I do believe that we are losing many of the fundamental virtues that have guided us and after losing your virtues there is little other than law to protect you from your vices. I believe many of the great men and women of this country were not even Christian as we would define it today but they were people with well-defined virtues. Those virtues which created for us a certain amount of freedom in spite of our flaws are being eroded and replaced by the regulation of everything. As Lord Moulton said in his extraordinary 1924 essay titled “Obedience to the Unenforceable”
“There are three great domains of Human Action. First comes the domain of Positive Law where our actions are prescribed by laws binding upon us which must be obeyed. Next comes the domain of Free Choice which includes all those actions to which we claim and enjoy complete freedom. But between these two there is a third large and important domain in which there rules neither Positive Law nor Absolute Freedom. In that domain there is no law which inexorably determines our course of action and yet we feel that we are not free to choose as we would… it is the domain of Obedience to the Unenforceable. The obedience is the obedience of a man to that which he cannot be forced to obey. He is the enforcer of the law upon himself…and to my mind the real greatness of a nation and its true civilization is measured by the extent of this land of Obedience to the Unenforceable. It measures the extent to which the nation trusts its citizens and its existence and testify to the way they behave in response to that trust. Mere obedience to Law does not measure the greatness of a Nation. It can easily be obtained by a strong executive and most easily of all from a timorous people. Nor is the license of behavior which so often accompanies the absence of Law and which is miscalled Liberty a proof of greatness. The true test is the extent to which the individuals composing the nation can be trusted to obey self-imposed law.”
James Madison said in 1788: “And if the success and safety of the government depend on the people, so that they’re depending on themselves, the people have to be good. No social contract, no matter how shrewdly devised, would allow the immoral and amoral to successfully govern themselves. But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation…. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.”
It is not necessary to be Christian to possess virtue. In fact, there is no need to “return America to Christ.” But, as Madison observed, what are the chances of any form of government that will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people? I call virtue the “residue of Eden” or what has been left over from perfection when the world of perfection was broken. It is available to all alike regardless of their religious beliefs. We don’t need Christian leaders. We only need virtuous leaders. We need virtuous people.
However, virtue is a wonderful and necessary thing but it is not the “obedience of faith” that Paul is describing. It is not righteousness that is revealed and is by faith from first to last. That is supernatural and available only to the follower of Christ.
It is that obedience of faith that we will be looking at over the next several weeks.