03/09/2017
Romans 1:1
Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.
The Time Has Come
For almost 18 years of preaching here at Bethlehem I have waited and waited for the time when it would seem most fitting to preach through Paul's letter to the Romans. I have considered it again and again, and backed off from the task - like a mountain climber gazing up into the clouds around the peak of Mount Everest and then turning to lower heights. It has felt very daunting.
But in God's patience and grace, I have felt in recent months that now is the time. We are coming to the end of a millenium. And I am well into the second half of my thirty-year pastorate of this wonderful church - if God wills. The pace of time feels quicker now at age 52 than it did when I came at age 34. And the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God (2 Corinthians 4:4), seems more glorious to me now than it ever has. And there is no greater exposition of the Gospel of God than the book of Romans.
I am not as moved now as I used to be by the tyranny of the urgent and by the need to respond to every trendy view that blows across the cultural sea in America. Well past midlife, I have a deep confidence that the best way to be lastingly relevant is to stand on rock-solid, durable old truths, rather than jumping from one pragmatic bandwagon to another. Romans is as solid and durable and reliable and unshakable and thorough as the truth can get.
My History with Romans
I have a personal history with the book of Romans that might stir up some of you to join me in the quest to meet God and know him and worship him and enjoy him and obey him as he meets us in the book of Romans.
Conversion
I don't remember being converted at age six at my mother's side in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (as my father reminds me). I only remember believing. But I do remember learning the meaning of my conversion - and I learned it from the book of Romans: "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (3:23); and "the wages of sin is death" (6:23); and "God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (5:8); and "if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved" (10:9). Which of us, who has tasted the goodness and glory of God in this great gospel, does not count the book of Romans precious beyond reckoning?
Call to Ministry of the Word
I went to college thinking that maybe I would be a doctor or a veterinarian. Then in the summer of 1966, between my sophomore and junior years, my whole life-direction changed, in the painful and precious providence of God. He called me to the ministry of the Word. That fall I had signed up to live with three friends in a dormitory suite. But midway through the year I knew I needed more solitude to study and pray the way I felt driven to study. For the next year and a half I lived alone in the single room of another dorm. And there I remember - I can see it and almost smell it - reading John Stott's little yellow book on Romans 5-8 called Men Made New. The effect on me was to seal the calling to be a faithful minister of God's Word. So Romans confirmed my conversion, and Romans confirmed my call to the ministry of the Word.
Theological Shaping
Then came seminary in 1968-1971, with all the overwhelming discoveries of the sovereignty of God. And under God the source from which all that new light was streaming was the book of Romans - first a course on Romans 1-8 and then a climactic course on the Unity of the Bible built around Romans 9-11. These were the days of decisive theological shaping in my life. Everything I have thought since is rooted there. So my conversion, my call to the ministry of the Word, and the decisive shaping of my vision of God was sealed by the book of Romans.
Call to the Pastorate
Then, after three years of study in Germany and six years of teaching at Bethel, Romans again became the decisive agent of God in my leaving teaching to become a pastor at this church in 1980. I had been working on Romans 9 for years, trying to understand the awesome picture of God in that chapter. In the fall of 1979, I was given a sabbatical and resolved to settle the matter, as best I could, and write a book about it. As I immersed myself in Romans 9 day after day, something utterly unexpected happened. The word I kept hearing for me personally was, "I, the God of Romans 9, will be heralded, and not just analyzed or explained."
On October 14, 1979, late at night after Noel had already gone to bed, God did the decisive work of calling me from teaching in college to preaching in the church. This was in the midst of writing The Justification of God, an exposition of Romans 9. The journal entry begins, "I am closer tonight to actually deciding to resign at Bethel and take a pastorate than I have ever been. . . . The urge is almost overwhelming. It takes this form: I am enthralled by the reality of God and the power of his Word to create authentic people." Within weeks a call came from Bethlehem that set in motion the events that brought me to this church and this pulpit. So again it was Romans that seemed to be the hinge on which the door of my life swung.
Sustaining the Ministry
And though I have never preached through Romans, it has been the great truths of Romans 8:28 and 8:32 that have sustained the ministry here these 18 years. And I can say with John Stott that I have heralded the final triumphant verses of Romans 8 at innumerable funerals and "never lost the thrill of them" (Romans: God's Good News for the World [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994], p. 10). "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39).
So I have a personal history with this book. And so do many, many people. I will be telling you some of their stories in the weeks - and years - to come (for instance, Augustine, Martin Luther, John Wesley, Karl Barth and some of you in this congregation). For now, suffice it to say that Samuel Coleridge, speaking for many, said, "I think that the Epistle to the Romans is the most profound work in existence"(Table Talk [Oxford: Oxford university Press, n.d.], p. 232). And John Knox (not the Scot) said that it is "unquestionably the most important theological work ever written" (The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 9 [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1954], p. 355).
How did this happen? How did it come about that the most important theological, Christian work ever written came from a former Jewish Pharisee who hated Christianity (Acts 9:1), and helped kill the first Christian martyr (Acts 7:58; 8:1), and persecuted the early church with passion (1 Timothy 1:13)? How did it happen that this man wrote a 22-page, 7100-word letter that "century after century . . . has been the flame at which one great Christian leader after another . . . has kindled his own torch to the revival of the church and the enrichment of Christendom" (A. M. Hunter, Introducing the New Testament [Gateshead: SCM Press Ltd., 1972], p. 94)?
The answer begins in Romans 1:1, in the first three phrases of the book - "Paul, a bond-servant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God." Take them one at a time and ponder what they mean about this man and his letter and his God. In all three phrases the crucial thing is not who Paul is, but whose Paul is. And this will, in the end, be what makes your life significant or not - not who you are, but whose you are.
A Bond-servant of Christ Jesus
First, Paul, the writer of this letter, says he is "a bond-servant of Christ Jesus." We are confronted immediately with a choice: is this man a deluded maniac? Jesus, called Christ, was killed in about A.D. 30 by a Roman governor named Pilate. We have several secular, historical testimonies to that fact. He was dead. Now here is Paul saying that this man, Christ Jesus, is not dead but is his master, and that he is the man's slave. Are these 16 chapters the rantings of a delusion? You must decide.
Paul's own testimony is not that he is deluded but that he is bought and owned and ruled by his own contemporary, who died and rose from the dead - Christ Jesus. I say "bought and owned," because that's what being a bond servant implies. In 1 Corinthians 7:23, Paul says, "You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men." In other words, Christians are slaves of Christ because he bought us by dying for us, and therefore he owns us. "You are not your own. For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Paul is the bond-servant of Christ Jesus because Christ bought him and owns him.
It also means that this living Christ rules him.
