Monthly Archives: March 2021

OUR GENEROUS GOD

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OUR GENEROUS GOD

“I do not want you to be unaware, brother and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles. I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome.

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed — a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” Romans 1:13-17.

Paul’s desire — God’s intention, but not yet, Paul. Why was Paul prevented from going to Rome as an apostle and evangelist? Did the devil hinder him? It may have seemed like it to him at the time. What was wrong with a desire like that? After all, did he not receive a commission to take the gospel to the Gentiles? And what better place than Rome, centre of the empire! Yes, he would go to Rome, but as a prisoner in God’s time.

However, as much as Paul wanted to go to Rome, he was also submitted to Jesus as his Lord. The Holy Spirit had directed his way up to that point and Paul could trust Him to lead him in the future. But there was nothing to hinder Paul from writing a letter to the church, and that was definitely God’s way for him because we have his letter preserved in God’s Word as a divinely inspired presentation of God’s plan of salvation.

In whatever way he could, Paul wanted to discharge his obligation. Why was it an obligation for him to preach the gospel to the whole world, both Jew and Gentile? Because of God’s nature! What do I mean? Because of God’s mercy to him, Paul, who did not deserve God’s grace because he was guilty of sin and worthy of death, he had an inescapable obligation to share that mercy with the world.

As much as it is right for us to share God’s love with others because we love Him and because of what He has done for us, it is equally a duty and an obligation. We may think that duty is cold and mercenary, a sort-of pay-back to God because of what He has done for us, but that is not God’s way. Sharing the good news with others is not paying God for our salvation. It is our way of displaying God’s nature by being generous towards others with what God has given us. Not to do so is to deny the divine nature that He has given to us (2 Peter 1:3).

In one short paragraph and in four words, Paul encapsulated the good news he was so eager to share: power — salvation — righteousness — faith; God and man brought together, reconnected by what God has done; and man’s response to God’s intervention. Did God have an obligation to rescue us from the disaster that was of our own making? No way! He did the right thing because of who He is, not because our need.

It’s always about Him. How many times has the question been asked, “What have I done to deserve God’s mercy?” Absolutely nothing! God’s mercy towards undeserving sinners has nothing to do with who we are and everything to do with who He is. If there is any obligation, God is obliged to Himself. Not to do anything to rescue human beings from our plight would be to deny Himself and God cannot do that.

It’s no wonder that Paul took pride in his calling and message. His obligation was also his delight. Would it not be a delight for a prison warder to walk down a row of prison cells and open each door announcing, “You are free to go!” There would be no greater joy than to see the look of surprise and excitement on the prisoners’ faces when they realised that they are no longer caged behind bars.

Would that warder not have an obligation to unlock the prison doors if he had been instructed to do so? If the prisoner refused to leave because he did not believe the warder’s story would be his choice, as long as the warder had done his duty.

So it was with Paul — and so it is with us. We are obliged to tell the people of the world that Jesus has unlocked their prison doors and they are free to leave and to follow Him, since He is the way to the Father. The message Paul had to deliver then is the same message now, of Jesus who has the power to make broken people whole again; not to tell people how bad they are but to tell them how good God is.

If we, and they, believe the message and trust the Son of God who came to show and tell us just how good God is, even to the extent that He paid our unpayable debt, they’ll be out of jail and on the way to a life of wholeness, imitating God by being generous with His mercy as He has been generous towards us.

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

PAUL’S DESIRE — GOD’S INTENTION

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PAUL’S DESIRE — GOD’S INTENTION

“First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world. God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of His Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last, by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you. I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to make you strong — that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith.” Romans 1:8-12.

Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, took his job seriously. He had been commissioned by his Lord to take the good news to the world. This did not necessarily mean that it was his personal responsibility to preach to every Gentile in the world. That would have been impossible then, even if he had all the technology and all the facilities we have today.

Paul relied on God’s amazing strategy of multiplication. It was God’s plan that the church grow by multiplication, the same strategy that works in nature. In spite of the slow modes of transport then, people, including believers, moved around from place to place and wherever they went, believers spread the story of Jesus.

Some new churches began through the work of faithful men, for example, men like Epaphras, who started the church at Colossae. Other churches sprang up as ordinary believers witnessed to their faith in Jesus as they moved around. No one knows how the church at Rome began but nevertheless Paul felt responsible to visit the believers in Rome, to ensure that they were on the right track and to strengthen them in the face of persecution.

The city of Rome was the hub of the Roman Empire. Paul knew how influential the church there was and it was his task to ensure that they understood and believed the truth of the gospel.  The news of their faith had already spread to the whole world. Paul would not exaggerate lest he be thought a liar. He rejoiced in their faith but he also prayed faithfully for them. They were in the firing line for both persecution and error.

Life for believers anywhere in the empire was an uphill battle. They were the targets of hostility from both Jews and Gentiles and the pernicious false teachings of self-proclaimed “apostles” who twisted the truth or added to it to make it more palatable. Part of Paul’s commission as an apostle was to interpret the events of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection and to teach the infant believers the truth that would steer them through the morass of false teachings.

This responsibility included the churches he did not personally found. The letter to the Roman church was borne in his heart as he battled the Judaisers, Jewish “believers” who insisted that Gentiles first be circumcised before they could embrace Jesus as their Lord. Paul was enraged by any teaching that subtracted from the sufficiency of Jesus for salvation by adding rules and ritual to faith in Him.

The church in the province of Galatia, possibly more than one church group, was hounded by these false teachers and had been taken in by them. Paul wrote a heated and emotional letter to them, pleading with them not to throw away their salvation by adding the law to their faith in Christ. Even submitting to circumcision would disqualify them from receiving God’s grace in Christ.

Paul’s letter to the Romans is like Mount Everest in the mountain range of New Testament letters. Through it, Paul paved the way for his intended visit to them by giving them a detailed explanation of God’s righteousness revealed through justification by faith in Christ alone, no doubt flowing out of his hot defence of the gospel to the Galatian believers. He wanted to see them face-to-face, to connect with them, to fellowship with them and to share his heart with them in person. A letter was good but a personal visit was better.

He was submitted to the will of God, no matter how much he longed to go to Rome. Little did he know, when he penned his letter, that his visit to Rome would be sponsored by the Roman government and his accommodation provided at Rome’s expense right in Caesar’s palace, albeit as a prisoner chained to a Roman soldier! All the better because his witness would spread throughout the palace guard and infiltrate Rome from the very top.

Talk about God’s wisdom in action! Paul may not have thought it up, but he certainly recognised it when it happened. In this masterplan of God, Paul’s desire to visit Rome and God’s plan to take him there, came together.

“Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear.” Philippians 1:12-14.

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

FROM GOD’S PERSPECTIVE

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FROM GOD’S PERSPECTIVE

“Through Him we received grace and apostleship to call all Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for His name’s sake. And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.

“To all at Rome who are loved by God and called to be His holy people: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 1:5-7.

What a power-packed greeting — the whole gospel in a nutshell, packed into two paragraphs!

In his address, which was the typical way in which ancient letters were written, Paul gave his own credentials; the subject of his letter; and the credentials of his recipients.

Since he was not personally known to the Roman church, he introduced himself to them as a servant and an apostle, set apart by God to deliver His good news to the world. But was Paul not a son of God, like everyone else who believed in Jesus? Of course he was! That was his standing before God, but from his point of view he was a servant. In another letter he described himself as a servant of God, a servant of the gospel and a servant of the church.

Paul was not subservient. He was as an apostle, one sent by God with a message and with authority, but he served God, the gospel and the church in his capacity as an apostle. It was not his right to do things his way. Since his apostleship was a calling from God and his authority delegated by God, he was first and foremost accountable to God for the stewardship of his calling and gifts.

Everything he had and did came from God, both the calling and the grace to carry it out. He was in a partnership with the Holy Spirit. It was not his right to call the shots; to make the decisions about where to go and what to preach. If he encountered trouble and persecution on the way, he was to stick to his calling and trust God for the grace to obey.

His apostleship gave him the right to declare and explain the gospel to the Roman church. He stood alongside the other apostles to whom Jesus had given the commission to place His yoke on those who believed in Him, His way of interpreting and living out the Torah — God’s teachings about Himself, them and the way to live.

The subject of his apostleship was the Lord Jesus Christ. He was the centre of everything, wherever Paul went and whatever the circumstances for him. Unfortunately for Paul, Jesus was a hot potato in the Jewish, Greek and Roman worlds.

To the Jew, Jesus was hated as an imposter and blasphemer because He said He was the Son of God. He angered the Romans because He challenged Caesar’s claim to be the son of God and the Greeks despised Him because He just did not fit their philosophical system. Their gods were powerful and despotic, not weak like Jesus who died on a Roman cross. That was nothing but foolishness to them.

And what of Paul’s readers? However they viewed themselves in the middle of all this antagonism and suffering, from God’s point of view they were His holy people, called and passionately loved by Him, the objects of His special attention, who provided both grace — everything they needed to be who they were — and peace — the outcome of being justified, declared not guilty because Jesus paid their debt.

How much both they, (and we), needed Paul’s reassurance in a world gone crazy! It is easy to doubt that we are God’s beloved children in the filth of the world around us. Just like the believers in Paul’s day, society today is just as rotten with violence, greed, promiscuity, corruption and every other kind of wickedness now, as then, and it is only getting worse.

Like lilies blooming in the swamp, we are God’s beautiful recreation, and we need to keep it in mind constantly lest we also be sucked into the cesspool of sin around us. In the midst of it all, we are called to be obedient to God because of our faith in Jesus. Much more than an intellectual assent to some teaching or other, faith in Jesus has brought us into fellowship with a holy God and requires us to be separated from sin and separated to Him.

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

ROMANS 1 – CAESAR OR NO CAESAR!

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ROMANS 1 – CAESAR OR NO CAESAR!

“Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God — the gospel He promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding His Son who, as to His earthly life, was a descendant of David and who, through the Spirit of holiness, was appointed the Son of God in power by His resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ the Lord.” Romans 1:1-4.

Jesus had come and gone. He had lived for thirty three years, spent three years teaching, preaching and doing miracles, was executed as a blasphemer and a threat to Rome, rose again and returned to the Father. The disciples were left blinking. What was that all about? How on earth were they to make sense of it all?

Ten days after He left them, the Holy Spirit came, just as Jesus had promised. The light came on and their Old Testament Scriptures began to pulsate with new meaning. Words Jesus had spoken, things He had done, and things that were done to Him began to fall into place.

On the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit invaded the lives of those who were waiting for Him, Peter — the one who had denied Him, the one who had hidden behind closed doors with the other eleven — stood up in the temple packed with worshippers from all over the Roman Empire, as well as the Jewish leaders who had led the charge against Jesus, and shot from the hip.

“Jesus was God’s Son. He proved it by His life and miracles. He died, but He came back to life by the power of God. You did it! You killed Him! But it was God’s plan, and now He has sent the Holy Spirit as He promised.” The crowd was horrified, appalled. Many in the group were there when they demanded His death and they were terrified. “What can we do?” they wailed.

“Repent!” said Peter, “and hand yourselves over to God’s mercy. Join Him, and us, and you will receive the same Spirit as we have.” And many of them did just that — three thousand on that day.

A few years before, in the vicinity of Israel’s “red light” district, Caesarea Philippi, where terrible things were going on in the name of pagan religion, Jesus gave them a commission. “Take my yoke, my disposition of compassion and mercy because of God’s mercy to you and give it to people like these, (referring to the pagans who were having intercourse in public with goats, in the name of their god, Pan). It will transform them and shut down places like this that are spawned by hell.”

Jesus’ yoke, which He placed on His disciples, would have serious repercussions for them in the Jewish and pagan Roman world to whom they were sent. They would clash with Roman and Jewish authorities because Jesus’ radical claims would be an in-your-face challenge to their authority and beliefs. It was the role of the apostles (the sent ones) to interpret Jesus’ life and death, under the Holy Spirit’s guidance, according to the Scriptures, and to invite their hearers to believe and to accept His yoke of discipleship for themselves.

In a shocking moment of revelation, one of the most vehement defenders of Judaism, Saul of Tarsus, met this risen Jesus and defected to “the Way” as the followers of Jesus were called. Jesus called him to interpret and proclaim the very message he was trying to stamp out by destroying as many believers as he could.

Paul, who was once Saul, became as ardent a protagonist of the faith he once persecuted as he had been an antagonist. Commissioned by the Holy Spirit, he and his companion, Barnabas, criss-crossed the provinces of Asia Minor and Europe with the message of Jesus. Paul longed to go to Rome, but he had to wait until he was taken there, compliments of the Roman government, to face trial for his “crimes” against the Jews.

In the meantime, a church had sprung up in Rome, thanks to the many unnamed believers who lived the message wherever they went. Paul was anxious that they in Rome understand the gospel because false teachers were everywhere, corrupting the truth with their misinterpretations. These false teachers did not understand Jesus’ yoke and they did not have the authority to interpret it to their hearers as did the apostles. And so, Paul wrote a letter.

With masterful strokes, Paul gave his credentials and painted a picture of the Jesus he was sent to proclaim. Against the backdrop of the arrogant claims of Caesar, Paul presented Jesus’ credentials for being worshipped as “Lord”. Jesus came in fulfilment of prophecy; He was descended from David, a true human; He died but was raised by the power of the Holy Spirit, truly God; authentically the Son of God and declared to be Lord. His full title: Jesus Christ the Lord — fully man, fully God and absolutely supreme, Caesar or no Caesar!

Acknowledgement

THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

 

FINALLY . . .

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FINALLY . . .

Our dear friend Luke the doctor, and Demas, send greetings. Give my greetings to the brothers and sisters at Laodicea, and to Nympha and the church at her house. After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn, read the letter from Laodicea. Tell Archippus: ‘See to it that you complete the ministry you have received in the Lord.’

I, Paul, write this greeting in my own hand. Remember my chains. Grace be with you (Col. 4:14-18).

Two more names appear in Paul’s list of greetings that are of interest to us. Luke, the doctor and author of Acts, was often Paul’s travelling companion but he seemed to come and go. There were times in his narrative of Paul’s travels that he speaks of ‘we’ as though he were with Paul. Did he travel with him as his personal physician or as a dear friend? We don’t know. Perhaps both. He was a familiar figure who brought comfort to Paul especially in his imprisonment.

The other name is that of Demas. Why is he familiar to us? Because of Paul’s chilling words to Timothy from his final imprisonment in Rome:

Do your best to come to me quickly, for Demas, because he has loved this world, has deserted me and gone to Thessalonica (2 Tim. 4: 9).

In the previous verses, Paul spoke of John Mark who had been a deserter but had returned and had become helpful to him (Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry (2 Timothy 4: 11). Demas was also a deserter but there is no record of his ever returning. John Mark, “the disappointment” had become John Mark “the helpful”. Demas, once helpful, was now useless because he had chosen the world.

‘Demas . . . he has loved this world’, five little words but the implications are huge. What is the problem with loving the world? God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

Demas loved the world too, but there was something sinister in Paul’s lament because it was an expression of sorrow for his desertion to the world, not of commendation for his ministry to the world.

Apostle John was aware of the danger of loving the world in the way that Demas loved the world.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in him. For everything in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever (1 John 2:15-17).

Loving the world as Demas did, implies identifying with the evil world system and fully participating in all of its evil ways. To love the world in this way is to negate what Jesus did for us through His death.

He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves (Col. 1: 13).

According to Jesus, we are in the world but not of the world. We still live in the world but we are not part of its rebellious attitudes and activities. We are here for a different reason. As Jesus was in the world, so are we – representing the Father and calling His lost sons and daughters to come home.

If we love the world as Demas loved the world, we have lost our perspective. The problem with the world as it is now is that it is transient and so are our earthly lives. The world will not remain forever in its present state. Everything in it that is contrary to God’s perfect will is destined to be destroyed by fire. Those who are of the world, participating in its rebellion and enjoying its sin, will go with it into eternal judgment.

Thus, Paul’s grief was very real because he knew the implications of Demas’s desertion. He has stepped backwards from eternal life to eternal death and there was no going back.

It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age and who have fallen away, to be brought back to repentance. To their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting Him to public disgrace (Heb. 6: 3-6).

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.