“Responsible Faith”

Let’s take our Bibles, please, and find Romans 15.  If you would like to use a pew Bible you can find that on Page 949.  We’re gonna talk about a responsible faith.

Romans 15  - this is quite a, well the words are simple, but the practice of this passage is not simple at all.  It is one of those passages that moves Christ really close to us.  He moves in right beside us where we live and we begin to then get a grip on what kind of faith Christianity really is and we see some of its distinctive nature, of how the God of Christianity, the true God, the one God above all Gods is a God who is transcended.  He is far and above away from us, but he is also imminent which means He is right with us today.  He is right next to you and me.  And my hope and my prayer is that we sense and know His presence today; that you and I feel that that gospel that Lisle talked about to the depth of our being, because as we’ll see in a moment, Christianity deals all the way to the level of our motives. 

So, we’re going to read it and it may not make a whole lot of sense at first reading, but you’ll find out Paul’s just writing to a church, they had some struggles and he’s telling them how to deal with their struggles.

Romans 15:1: [We’ll read through verse 7]

“We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.  Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.  For Christ did not please himself but, as it is written, ‘the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.’ For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction.  That through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.  May the God of     endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one   another in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the Goad and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore, welcome one another  as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God.”

Big words, hard to apply, but really not hard to understand. What we want to do first is see this Biblical situation.  I just want us to fly back to the first century, sit in on church for a minute and find out what’s going on there.  There was a bit of a problem in the Roman church.  Paul was on his way there, hadn’t been there yet, and he knew he had a unity problem, which really bothered Paul because it really bothered God. 

One of the things that is hard for us that has been hard for me to grasp through the years of studying the scriptures is the imperative and the importance that God puts on unity among his people, because we are so diverse.  But, the older I get, the more I read, you cannot escape the importance and the imperative of us being unified.  It doesn’t mean that we are all alike; that’s not unity, that’s uniformity.  It means that we live in an environment where grace covers a multitude of sins.  It means that we live in an environment where we see life through the lens of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, that we are all humans, that we have all fallen and sinned, that if we know Christ, we have simply been redeemed by his grace, a free gift of God.  Unity is built on that, but unity in the church is what Paul was dealing with, and you pick that up in verse 1.  He says:

          “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.”

Well, if you read Chapter 14, you see there is something similar going on in Rome as there was in Corinth to where you had some mature believers in the church and some immature.  Some strong believers and some weak believers.  Now, what the strong and the weak meant is not necessarily how we would see it. As a matter of fact, sometimes we invert these things because we think the strong believer is the one who has a big list of Do’s and Don’ts and they don’t do these things and they do these things and they live this life of some outside visible righteousness of behavior, but what Paul was dealing with was there was a group of people in the church that was stronger.  They had come to faith in Christ and by the Holy Spirit they had learned, they had dug into the sermons that had been taught them and they began to understand they were saved by grace alone.  Not one thing did they do to earn their salvation. Not one thing could they do after truly being converted could they lose their salvation, so they quit being superstitious.  They quit holding Holy Days, reverencing certain seasons of the year.  They weren’t afraid to go in an idol’s temple because they knew it was just an idol restaurant to eat food sacrificed to another because it was just a piece of meat; it meant nothing to them.  But, on the other side, you had people who were genuinely converted but they hadn’t got a grip on grace yet.  And they were kind of afraid of disappointing God and maybe slipping off and losing that grace, and they didn’t understand that Christ’s grace, that Christ had fulfilled all the law and that they were free to do many things, and so there was a bit of a conflict.  These people would look at those people and say, “Man you are a bunch of libertines. You’re not living Holy lives.  These people would look at those people and say, “You are just an immature brat in the church; why don’t you grow up?”  

Now, I’m sure that none of us have ever looked at anybody else in the church and thought they were immature, have we?  That is the first sign of knowing you are not mature, according to the scriptures.  But what struck me most about this verse is how personal and how demanding God is.   Read it again…

          “We who are strong have an obligation to bear the failings of the weak.”

That’s not a verse you choose… Oh, you know, I wonder, I think maybe He wants me to help them out every now and then.”  God is close and personal here and it makes him begin to squirm a little bit.  He goes on in verse 2 and says:

          “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” 

So, there was this issue of unity in the church and then Paul addressing them, inspired by the Spirit of God, recognizes that there are different levels of maturity in the church.  We’ll deal with this objective nature of Christianity in a moment, but, I’ve explained a bit about what strong meant.  It meant strong in grace.

Then what did he do?  He laid down clear responsibilities based upon maturity.  Both were to function for each other’s good.  That’s a principle understood in Christianity in the church, but the responsibility, the chief end of the responsibility lay on the shoulders of the strong.  “We, who are strong, have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak.”  That could say, the weaknesses of the weak.  Not only are we to bear them up, we are not to look condescendingly down our nose at someone who just hadn’t come along very far in Christ.  It is our responsibility to take their weaknesses on our shoulders, to pick them up and carry them along.  And then it was real interesting to me how Paul began to teach them.  Let’s take a look at it.  We’re just going to do a survey real quickly.

First of all he addresses the action because he has already addressed the subject in Chapter 14.  And he comes right down with his application of his message through the letter and he tells them, “Okay, you strong people…here’s what you need to do.  You owe a debt to these people.  You are under strong obligation to bear with them.  That means you are to pick up and carry their burden, not simply to put up with their silliness and their stumbling, but to carry them, not to criticize them.

Now, the way I want you to do that is I don’t want you do it to please yourselves, I want you to do it to please them and to do it for their good and for their building up…very plain.  That’s good.  So, how in the world and why am I supposed to do that, Paul?

He goes on from there and he gives the example in Verse 3, he gives the example of Christ.  Then he drops down from there and gives them the scriptures; that they are written for our instruction.  Then he goes to praying for them.  He says the scriptures are that which give endurance and encouragement, so am then going to pray and ask God, who wrote the scriptures, to give you endurance and encouragement and then after that, I’m going to give you the full and final reason you are to do this, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because a unified church means a glorified God.

Well, that’d be a great place to end wouldn’t it.  I would say facetiously, let’s close our Bibles and go home, but I’m afraid some of you would beat me to the punch and you’d close your Bible and get up to walk out.

Actually, that’s where my comfort level is fine, until I realize he’s addressing me and you.  These timeless words tell us this: 

Christianity demands specific life change.  Christianity demands specific life change.

 There’s a lot that can be said about that.  We’ll try to stick right to this passage and how we learn that from it, but we need to say these two things:

We must understand this so we will do the work of evangelism properly.

What do I mean by that?  Now in this congregation this morning, many of you have been in church your entire life.  Many of you are genuine believers in Christ and you would like to see others come to faith in Christ.  Others of you are on the edge; you really haven’t committed your life to Christ.  You don’t know for certain if you want to or not, you are thinking it through.  Some of you, maybe this is the first time in church forever or for the first time in your life.  The church wants people to come to Christ.  But, we soften the gospel and say: “All you need to do is pray and ask Jesus into your life and then you’ll be saved and you can go to Heaven.”  Just rub this lucky rabbit’s foot of a prayer and then things will be okay.  It is true that all we have to do is cast our faith on Christ and He will save us, it is true of that.  But when you are saying that you believe that He died, was buried and rose again to give you new life and you are bowing the knee to Him and calling Him Lord, then the only right result it serious life change.

Let’s look at the life change this passage demands of us.

We, who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.  Let each of us please his neighbor.”

Can you think of any other place in the Bible where it talks about pleasing or loving your neighbor?  How about the greatest commandment of all that Jesus said. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and the second commandment is like unto it, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

That’s what Paul is doing.  He is centering us in our faith on this issue of love and that is one of the transformational marks of anyone who has come to faith in Christ.  So what we see in practicality is this: We must become responsible and relational.  We cannot live in isolation.  That is one of the changes Christianity makes.  Christianity is lived out in the context of relationships.  You want to know how your faith is?  How are your relationships?  How’s your relationship with your spouse?  I’m not saying it is trouble-free, it’s how you are working on those troubles.  How’s your relationship with your co-workers?  How is your relationship, probably most importantly with those in the church?  That  is a measure of our faith.  Look what Paul is telling them.  There are strong people in the church, there are weak people in the church.  Strong people:  You have an obligation and that literally means owing a debt, having a strong obligation towards; it is your responsibility to bring in the weak ones, to help them along.

The Apostle John liked that word.  The apostles didn’t mind telling us what we are obligated to.  We live in a day of Christianity where we feel like we can’t tell people they are obligated for anything.  Most of us have been joining churches for years that when you join the church you are obligated to do nothing.  You don’t have to pray, you don’t have to give, you don’t have to come.  You just get your name on the church role. Well, who in the world would want to go to a church like that?  It wouldn’t mean anything to you.  There are clubs that people join and pay money to do that because they want to be there and the pay their dues without question because that’s what they want to do; they don’t mind the requirements.  The Bible lays obligations on us.  John liked it.  He said in 1^st John 2:6:  We are obligated to walk as Jesus walked.”  Same word.  In 1^st John 3:16 he said that we are obligated to lay our lives down for our brothers. In 1^st John 4:11 he said we are obligated to love one another.

Now you see why I wanted to quit earlier.  Because I’m already asking, “Okay, how in the world am I going to do this?”  I do not find this kind of address very easy. So, at least my ears perked up, but I did kind of feel like a puppy with my tail tucked because that’s not so easy to do.

1.                 We learn to see ourselves and others objectively through the gospel.

How do you think they felt when Paul called them in the church, “Strong” and “Weak?” Was he being mean?  No.  He had the cross; he had the gospel through which he saw them.  He wasn’t measuring them as their worth before God or as their merit in front of people or as their stage and state in society.  He was measuring them in a sense, looking at them as how they understood and grasped the gospel.  So, when we know what God has done for us and is asking for us, we learn to see ourselves and others objectively through the lens of the gospel.  What does that mean?  It means I do not have to fear seeing what is deep in me because I have a gospel through the Lord Jesus Christ that will cleanse it and the more I grasp that, the more objectively I can look at other people without looking at them, ah, critically, and condemning and judgmentally and I can take this gospel of grace to them.  It allows us to look at others objectively.

2.                 Christianity demands specific life change and shows us that this faith of ours, the gospel, works at the level of our motives.

Did you notice at the end of Verse 1, he says that we are to bear with the failings of the weak, not to please ourselves.  Have you ever served someone for what you were going to get out of it? Invited someone somewhere because you know you’ll get an invitation in return? Bought someone a gift because you know you’d get one back?

You see our motive, God knows that, and He knows when our motives are right, then our actions will be right.  This gospel moves in so close to us it wants to change our very motives, so finally in changing that, we live with a new aim, and that aim is for the good of others.  For his good and to build him up.  We are to bear with one another and we are to build each other up, just like building a building.

Can you think of anyone around you that needs encouraged? Built up?   No wonder the Bible tells us to let no unwholesome talk come out of our mouth, but to speak that which will build one another up.  Do you understand the power of your tongue?  It has the power to give life.  It also has the power to take it away.  It’s amazing how far the spoken word can reach into the soul of a human being and crush us.  Do you know someone who needs to be built up?  My question then is this? How in the world, if I have this responsibility, can I live such a life?  Is it possible to do that kind of thing in the church?  Is it possible for you to do it, for me to do it, on our own, obviously it is not, but look at the practical approach Paul now takes.

Verse 3, he says this: “For Christ did not please Himself, but as it is written, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.”  [That’s a quote from Psalm 69]  The very first thing Paul does once he shows them their responsibility and virtually demands that they do it, he says I’m not reasonlessly asking you to do something.  He says let me point you back to the cross.  He is always attaching everything he does to the Cross.  He’s so Gospel centered, cross centered, he said, “I want you to look at the example of Christ.  I want you to always stay close to the cross.”  His demands were rooted in the fact that we have the Son of God who left Heaven, died on the cross for us that he might seek and save that which is lost, and to give his life a ransom for many.  God will never ask you to do something for which you can point to Jesus and say, “He wouldn’t do it.”  For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with the feelings of our weaknesses, but one who is tempted in all ways like as we are, yet was without sin.”  We cannot say, “God, You don’t understand.”  You see, that’s the uniqueness of our faith.  He does understand.  He lived in our flesh.  He knew what it was to consider others as more important than himself, and to look at the weak and to bear them up and all He is doing is asking us to be like Him. 

Suppose the church did that.  Do you think it would have any effect on the outside world as they looked at us?  Would that make us any different than the rest of the world?  Would that make our Saviour attractive?  You see, as your soul becomes satisfied in God alone, it is your pleasure to tell other people of that satisfaction by serving them.

So Paul says, the first thing I want you to do, if you want to meet the demands that Christianity makes of you in these specific life changes, I want you to look to the cross. I want you to look and see that you cannot do it on your own, but through the gospel you can.

The second thing I want you to do is to listen and to learn from the Word of God.  Verse 4:  “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction.  That through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.” He gives an example.  The example is the life of Christ.  We learn about Christ from the scriptures.  Anything we know about Jesus we only know that from the Bible.  We can’t make up things we want Jesus to be like.  Paul went to the Old Testament scriptures, found a model verse to show that Christ was our model .  He went to history to show that Christ died on the cross to serve us, and then he says, ‘here’s what I want you to do.”  By my model, I want you to know if you want to dig into life, you need to listen and learn from the Word of God.  That is exactly the thing you would expect to hear at church.  You have heard that all your life.  What do you do to grow as a Christian?  You pray and you read the Bible!

Can I be real plain? How much more would you have grown as a believer if you had prayed and read your Bible?  You say, “That’s just too simple, Tony.”  Are there any people that you like to read their books?  Any authors?  Anybody have any favorite authors, and you just can’t wait until their new book comes out because you want to sit down and devour what they have to say? Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction?  I have a few favorite authors and there are some people I love to read.  Why do I love to read them?  It’s their style, they engage me, sometimes, if it is personal you want to get inside their life.  You want to know them.  There are other people I love to hear speak.  Man, and when they get biographical in their talking, it’s like I get up on the edge of my seat because I want to know about them.  There are certain pastors that I admire, and we’re in a session with just pastors and they kind of let their hair down if they have any, and they want to share with us what real life is like in their home….I sit up on the edge of my seat.  When I say, “Read your Bible,”  I’m saying the same thing Paul did.  I want you to open your ears and I want you to say, “Oh, God, would you talk to me?  Would you speak to me?”  You see, this is no ordinary book!  This is God’s Word.  Reading that book is like hearing God speak to you.  And, in this book is how He teaches us truth, how He turns our perspective in life to see the world as He sees it and to not see it as other people see it, and without this book I know nothing of Christ, I know nothing of God.  I know nothing much of how life really operates.  So we have to listen to and learn from the Word of God, and, the third thing, what’s Paul do after he says this? He says, “For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction that through endurance and through encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.”  Well… that’s a whole sermon in and of itself.  If you want to know why your hope is gone, it’s probably because you haven’t put enough things in your soul to hope for.  The scriptures chiefly give us hope.  And since the Word of God itself gives us endurance and encouragement, look at what Paul does.  The very next thing he does, he gives the example of Christ, he gives them the truth of scripture, and he prays that same truth of scripture for them. Verse 5, as Doug said, is a prayer:  “May the God of endurance and encouragement [specifically praying the scriptures for them] grant you to live in such harmony with one another in accord with Christ Jesus [you can’t do it without God but you can with God through Christ] pray in accordance with God’s promises and purposes.  That is really that simple, but not that easy to do.  How can I live such a life?  I look at the example of Christ; I put Him in my mind.  I think about what He does.  Well, how do I put that in my mind?  By listening to and learning the Word of God.  If I don’t know the Word of God and I don’t know the gospel of God, the truth of the matter  is, I don’t know why I can pray, I don’t know how I can pray and I don’t know what to pray.  Paul knew he could pray because Jesus was interceding.  He knew why he could pray because of that.  He knew how to pray as he spoke to Christ through his model, and he knew what to pray from the scriptures.  I want you to have endurance and encouragement to live this way because you’re going to need it.

So, what’s our take home value?  What good does a first century document do you and me?  Three things:

1.                 Differences within the church become the soil in which our faith bears fruit or our faith fails.

Do you ever think of it that way?  Differences within the church become the soil in which our faith bears fruit or our faith fails.  Suppose the Lord Jesus would have had the attitude with his disciples that we have had with church members who differ with us?  Don’t you think his operation with the disciples was the strong  bearing the weaknesses of the weak? And how often he had to put up with them, and how often…you know what’s terrible about being a parent and your child does something, especially, you know when they are little, and they whine, and they whine, and they whine, and you instruct them, and you instruct them, and you instruct them, and they whine, and they whine, and they still do what you told them not to do?  Have you ever had this experience and then you get fed up with them, you’re just so fed up with them you could bite your fingernails off and you want to spank ‘em and you want to put ‘em in their room and you want to sit there in there for 2 months.  You know, “Why are you acting that way?”   You lose your temper, you say something you shouldn’t have said or your discipline is overly harsh, your tongue’s too sharp and you storm out and you go to your room, or you go somewhere or out in the yard, kick the dog or something.  And then God says…”Is that the way I father you”  Because isn’t that the same way you treat me?  I talk to you and I talk to you and I talk to you and you still don’t listen.  And when life gets a little hard, you whine, and you complain and you gripe, and ….you just kind of melt.  You go back and apologize to your child and you bend you knee and say,                  

” Father, give me grace to be what I should be.”

Take home value :

    1.   Differences within the church become the soil in which our faith bears fruit or our faith fails.

Strong Christians do not look down their noses at weak ones, they bear them up.  The minute  we criticize and look down our nose, we move from the strong category to the weak. The individual transformed by the grace of God becomes God’s very instrument to minister to others. Christianity is lived out in the context of relationship.  Howard Hendrix said, “Often if your Christianity doesn’t work at home, it doesn’t work and don’t export it.”  Good word!

2.                 Every act of faith requires three power sources [now don’t miss this] 

It is simple, it is known, but it is sometimes just ignored.  Every act of faith requires three power sources.  If you want to serve God and you want to serve him faithfully,

1.     You need to learn how to meditate on the life of Christ and what He did and the way to do that is to read the gospels.  To think through what Jesus did.  To follow him in your mind, to use the imagination as God has given it to you for use.

2.     So that you can understand that properly, take the whole of the Word of God and pour it into your life, the classic verse of the use of the Word of God is Psalm 119:11.  That one verse that you memorized years ago in Vacation Bible School, “Your word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee.”

You see our propensity to sin rages without the Word of God in there to tell us   the truth.

3.       The third is prayer. 

Some of you look like, “Now I’ve heard that before.”  I know you have, but are you?  You say, “I’ve tried.  It’s just boring, Tony.  I talk for 3 minutes and it feels like I’ve talked for an hour and I don’t have anything else to say.”  That’s why you take the Christ’s example first, the Word of God after that, then you take your prayer life and you look at the real life you are around, and, my friend, my life has a bunch of stuff that needs to be prayed over; people around me, my own soul. So, why wouldn’t I talk to God about it if He’s promised in his Word to give me an audience, He will hear our prayers!

And, last, when Grace has captured our hearts and we are made strong, we live with two aims and this is the way to find out if you are one of the strong in the church or not.

The first aim is the good of others.  We bear them up and we build them up.

Now just suppose that was the constant environment going on around here.  When you looked at somebody and you could just tell that they needed a word of encouragement, you forgot about the pity party you were having in your own soul and you looked at them and you just said an encouraging word, “How ya doin?  Can I help you out?”  And you BUILD THEM UP.  You get someone who is tumbling, they doubt, they wonder about things, they don’t know if they are saved some days or not, they are not understanding this grace issue.  What are you going to do, “Won’t you grow up?” or “Come on let me tell you about a couple of things.” Share a few life experiences, a few things from the Word.

Understanding that when grace has captured our hearts, the first aim is to bear up and build up, and the second aim is the glory of God, because a unified church is a glorified God.

What Paul gave us was a functional purpose.  The functional purpose was this:  That the strong should bear the infirmities or the failings of the weak. The final purpose, the ultimate purpose is in verse 6 and 7.  That together, unified, you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore, welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you for the Glory of God.

We were singing one of the songs in church today that says, “that we were going to give God power.”  Now how do you give God power?  He’s already all powerful.  How do you give God glory?  He’s all glorious.  It’s not that we are giving God something he doesn’t have, it is that we are letting God be in our lives what he is, and when we give him power we take the hands off the steering wheel and say, God, you drive.”  That’s giving God power, and when we give God power, what happens is, we gain a rightly ordered life.  All of life that isnt surrendered to God is out of order, and when we have an ordered life, surrendered to God, people look at us and say “You’re different.”  And then, that’s how we share glory.  And then when we look at our brothers and we bear their burdens, that’s how we share grace.  And that is what the world needs to see from the church.

Take home value, I would have to say this:  It’s the beginning of the year.  I would seriously urge you to say, “Okay, God, I think I understand a few things you want.  I see that the means to get there is to know about, meditate on, and imitate the life of Christ, to read your Word and understand You and then to pray about those very specific things I’ve seen in the Word and to ask that you would make them happen in my life.  Where are you going to start reading your Bible?  Where in the Bible?  If you are brand new to it, I would suggest one of the gospels and then move through your New Testament.  When are you going to read it?  And as soon as you read it, find one thing in that Bible reading that you will pray about and others that day.  If you want a simple prayer list, list the people you are concerned for, then find in the Bible what God says and then pray that for them. That’s a whole lot better than praying they’ll be healthy, get a good career and have a happy marriage. Those things are very important, but if that’s all we pray for, they can have that and still die and go to Hell.  We need them to know God, so that that marriage and that job would be fulfilling to them because it is under God.  So, don’t go home today and say, “Boy church was over, preacher finished 7 minutes early  - that’s always a good day!”  What are you gonna do?