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Preached in Markham Baptist Church, September 14, 2003. Romans 10:1-15 OUR VISION - PART 2: TO MAKE HIM KNOWN Let’s look at Romans 10, starting at verse1. Paul is in the middle of a discussion here. In chapters 9, 10 and 11, he is having a discussion with the Romans about the Israelites and their place in God’s plan. In chapter 10 he puts us right in the middle of the discussion. The version that is in your pews will refer to “them”. Paul is talking about the Israelites when he speaks of “them”. Romans 10:1-15: “Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved. I can testify that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened. For, being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they have not submitted to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. “Moses writes concerning the righteousness that comes from the law, that ‘the person who does these things will live by them.’ But the righteousness that comes from faith says, ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down)” or “Who will descend into the abyss?”’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? ‘The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart’ (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved. The scripture says, ‘No one who believes in him will be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him. For, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ “But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!’” We’ll just go that far this morning. For two weeks, last week and this week, we are looking at our vision as Markham Baptist Church. Last week we discovered our vision, the overall banner of our vision. We have a big vision document that outlines everything that we seek to do as a church. But the overall banner, the overall emphasis, the direction that we want to go is “To know Him and to make Him known.” Last week we thought about how we want to know Him. We just don’t want to know about Him; we want to know Him. We want to know Him in our hearts. We want to experience His grace and love. We want to see Him transform lives and turn this whole community around so that it is a community that loves God and seeks to follow Him. That is our desire: to know Him, not just to know about Him, but to know Him our hearts and in our experience. That does not mean that we should be casual in our knowledge of Jesus Christ. It does not mean that we can mess up the facts of who Christ is. We have to be very careful. We should know who Jesus Christ is, and we should know all about Him and we should study our scriptures in order to help us known Him better. We also want not only to know Him but to make Him known. That is the goal of our church: to make Him known. That is the vision that we are seeking to fulfil: to make Him known in this community and around the world. It is a vision that is given to us from Jesus Christ, from His example. Jesus Christ came to seek and to save the lost. That’s what we read: Jesus Christ came to seek and to save the lost. That was His goal, and so it is our goal, for that is the example of our Lord Jesus Christ. Not only is it His example; it is His command. He says to His disciples, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them everything that I have commanded you.” So we have a vision - to make Him known - and it is a vision that is given to us from Christ Himself. And it is a vision that also has to do with the heart. Just as “to know Him” is a matter of the heart, so is “to make Him known” a matter of the heart; it is a heart passion, a zeal that we have that the people around us would know Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. It is a heart desire that Paul exemplifies for us in his letter to the Romans. In Romans 10:1, we read: “Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them” - that is, the Israelites - “is that they may be saved.” It is his heart’s desire that the Israelites would be saved - of course, he wants the Gentiles to be saved; he wants everyone to be saved, but his heart’s desire, his burning passion, is that they would be saved. Chapter 10, verse 1 is rather tame, compared to chapter 9, verse 1. Take a look at what Paul says there: “I am speaking the truth in Christ - I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit - I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh.” Wow! I could wish, he says, that I would be cut off from heaven itself, that I would lose the salvation that I have in Christ in order that my kindred, my fellow Israelites would be saved. I would be willing to lose that, he says. I think of some of the prayers that I say and some of the prayers I hear, and I think of my own prayer: “Thank you for this nice day and for the nice weather. It’s so nice, Father. Thank you for my nice church; the people in it are so nice. Thank you, Father, for all the good things you have given to me. Amen.” Then maybe, at the end: “Oh yes, God. Please save my neighbour. Let him know that you are Lord and Saviour of his life, because he is so nice, and he would make a good Christian.” That kind of prayer is a long way from what Paul is saying here: “I’d be willing to see myself accursed if it meant that my fellow Israelites could be saved. I’d be willing to give up my place in heaven and go to hell if they could be saved.” Then I think of my little prayer, which lightly trips off my tongue. They are worlds apart, aren’t they? One is just one lightly spoken, the other is a heart passion and a zeal: “Oh God, save them and, if need be, take my place; let them be saved.” It is a heart passion, a heart’s desire. You know where it comes from, don’t you, this heart desire that others would know Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord? Where does it come from? It comes, for Paul and for us, from an experience of Christ’s love. In 2 Corinthians 5:14, Paul writes those wonderful words: “Christ’s love compels us.” Christ’s love compels us. Christ’s love motivates us. Christ’s love moves us to share His love with those around. Paul says, “Christ’s love was so amazing that I just have to share it with those around us.” And so with us; when we taste Christ’s love and His grace, we can’t keep it to ourselves. Have you ever gone to a restaurant and experienced food that was so good it was out of this world, food so delicious that it just melts in your mouth? And then, when you came out of that restaurant, you had to say to your friends, “You have got to go to that restaurant. It is so good. The food there is so wonderful. Everything I have tasted since then tastes like dirt on a dry day. I tell you, the food there is so good, you’ve got to go. It’s so well presented, and the waiters there are amazing, but the food, there’s nothing like it.” Have you ever done that? And so with Jesus Christ when we experience His love and His grace, it so fills us; let it bubble over, let it just enthuse out of you: “Oh, do you know my Saviour, who has saved me? Do you know my Saviour, who has redeemed me and who has called me His own? Do you know Him? Oh, I’ve got to tell you about Him. You really should meet Him.” For Paul, the experience of Christ’s love was so amazing. We know Paul’s experience; we know Paul to be a persecutor of the church at one time who was responsible for the death of many people. Paul was just overwhelmed that Christ would still love him, that Christ would still consider him to be worthy to be a child of God. That’s Paul’s experience. Then I think of my own experience and while I’m no murderer I know my heart, and I know what it was like, full of lust and full of greed and full of sin, and I cannot believe that God would love me, that He would call me a child of His. Think of your own heart. Think of the love that is yours in Him, that He would love you. It is not a love that says, “As long as you do this and this and this, I’ll love you.” No, it is a love that will endure for ever. It is a love that will love you in spite of the fact that you fail. You can spit in His son’s face. You can put a crown of thorns on His son’s head. You can drive nails into His wrist and hang Him on a cross, and He still loves you. That’s the depth and the height and the length and the breadth of His love for you. We experience it, and we say, “We’ve just got to share it with other people.” That’s how you have that heart passion, isn’t it? Stephen Lungu was here in the spring. He is on staff with African Enterprise in Malawi. You will remember he was telling about his work there and his testimony about how God brought him out of the gang life and into a life of Christ. You will perhaps remember that he mentioned his book, Out of the Black Shadows, a great biography. You should read it; it’s fantastic. In it he tells of how the morning after he received Christ as Lord and Saviour, he said, “I just couldn’t keep that news to myself.” He found himself on a bus. Think of an African bus; it’s just packed with people. There he is; he has travelled along the dirt roads. People are mingling about. It’s Monday morning; they are just a little bit hazy at the start of new week. He stands up and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have got to tell you that something amazing happened to me last night.” He gets everybody’s attention. He says, “I found Jesus Christ.” Someone tells him to be quiet, and he says it again: “No, but I found Jesus Christ.” Someone beside him, says: “No preaching on Mondays!” The bus came to a stop, the door opened in order to pick people up, and he said, “I felt a hand on the back of my neck, and I was thrown out of the bus. I landed on the ground and had to spit the dirt out of my mouth.” What did he do? He dusted himself off and got on the next bus. He said, “This time I was a little wiser. I didn’t turn my back on anybody. I stood right beside the driver, and I turned and I looked at everyone and I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I have got to tell you that something amazing happened to me last night. I found Jesus Christ.’” This time everyone was quiet, and he went on to tell his testimony of how he had been saved and how he had experienced the love of Jesus Christ. He said people were weeping in the bus, and someone shouted, “How can we find Christ?” He said, “I don’t know.” “What do you mean, you don’t know?” He’d only been a Christian for 12 hours; he didn’t know what to do. “I don’t know, but I guess we should pray.” Four of them, along with him, got off the bus. He said, “We need to pray.” “Here?” “Yes, right here.” And they knelt down – people stepped over them, walked over them, hit them and said, “Stop kneeling in the middle of the road.” They knelt down and prayed; and they received Christ as Saviour and Lord. And Stephen Lungu says that two of those four people became pastors. The love of Christ just fills us. We’ve just got to bubble over and share it with other people. There is where you get that zeal from. But not only this. The love of Christ compels us and fills us; so we have just got to share it. It is our love for other people. As Christ’s love fills us, we are able to love those around us. Think of the amazing fact that Paul said these words about people who were persecuting him; they wanted to put him in prison, they wanted to kill him, and yet here he is saying, “I am willing to go to hell if they could be saved.” His love for them was so strong because he had experienced Christ’s love; his love for them, in turn, just overflowed. And he hated to see them follow the wrong path. This is what he says in verse 2: “I can testify that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened.” They have a zeal for God, they have an energy for God, but they are travelling in the wrong path, they are going in the wrong direction. They’re not going to find Him, because they were following in the wrong direction. We learned about it a little bit last week from Philippians 3, how the Israelites kept the law and in order to win God’s favour, that’s why they kept the law. They thought, “If I can do all this outward stuff, then I’ll have God. I’ll have His favour.” Paul says, “No, no. You’re looking for a righteousness – that is, a right standing – that doesn’t come from God.” A righteousness that comes from God – a right standing with God – is one that comes from faith in Christ. He says in verse 4 that Christ has put an end to the law. That means that He has accomplished the law – He has fulfilled the law for you and for me – so just have faith in Him, because He has done what we could not do. He has a passion for people who have a zeal for God but are going in the wrong direction. In our culture, we have been told that as long as people have a zeal for God, that’s okay. They can follow Buddha, they can follow Krishna, they can follow any New Age thought that they like, or they can simply live a good and moral life, and as long as they have a zeal for God, then that’s okay. Listen, it’s not okay. There is one way to God, and it is through faith in Jesus Christ. If a zeal for God was good enough, why didn’t Jesus Christ say to the Pharisees, “Hey, Pharisees, you’re doing all right, you’re doing okay, keep the law, you’re on the right track. You might squeak in to win God’s favour. But don’t worry. Go ahead”? But He didn’t. He looked at the Pharisees and said, “You’re whitewashed tombs, you’re walking dead, and you’re heading nowhere, because you don’t know the righteousness that comes from me.” Or when Thomas says to Jesus, “Jesus, I have a question. I don’t know the way. Could you show us the way?” If a zeal for God was enough, wouldn’t Jesus have said to Thomas, “You know, Thomas, that’s a good question. You keep asking those questions all the way along and you’ll be fine. You’ll find yourself in heaven one day.” He didn’t. He laid out a map for Thomas, He opened it up and said, “Thomas, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.” You see, it is more than having a zeal for God, and it is more than just living a moral life; it is having faith in Jesus Christ, for He is the way to God, He is the only one, He is the way. We must believe in Him. And so Paul says, “My heart breaks for those who are going in the wrong direction.” Then he gives us an example, in verses 5 to 7. What did Moses say about the law? Just before Moses died, he said to the Israelites, “You know, I’ve written a law, and it’s near you. You don’t have to go up to heaven to find the law. You don’t have to go down to the depths of the sea to find the law. I’ve written it. In fact, you can read it, and it could be on your heart and it could be on your lips.” Paul says it’s the same thing with faith in Christ; he’s near, he’s that close. Our Lord Jesus Christ has descended from heaven, He has ascended from the depths of death itself, and He has defeated sin and death and now He lives near us, and all of us, whoever believes in your heart and confesses Him with your mouth, you will be saved. It’s that close. It’s that near. A love for the people, that we would see people, lost, that without Christ, they are going to an eternity without Him. It was William Booth who said, in order to complete the training of his evangelists on the streets of London, he wished he could do one thing, and that is to take them by the feet and hang them over the fires of hell for 24 hours; if he could just do that, then he would know that he had ingrained in them what lostness means and where lostness goes – the pain and the anguish that people are in without God. Oh, that we would have that, that our love for them would be so strong that we would lose our inhibitions, that we would be willing even to lose our place in heaven in order to share the love of Christ with them. That zeal comes from experiencing the love of God in our hearts and then having a love for others. Then this. Let’s be intentional. That’s what Paul says in verses 14 and 15: “But how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim Him? And how are they to proclaim Him unless they are sent?” My friends, we need to be intentional about sharing the love of Christ with those around us. We need to be intentional, to actually go – you know, we commission missionaries, we commission pastors, but we also, ourselves, each one of us, are called to go and share the love of Christ with our neighbours, with our friends and with our relatives. We have to be intentional. We have to give voice to the faith and the love that is in us, of how God has transformed our lives in the person of Jesus Christ. I wonder how we, as a church, can be intentional. Part of the reason we put together our vision statement was so that we would intentional, that we would take intentional steps in making Christ known in our community. That’s what we long to do. But I wonder how we can do it. I heard Leith Anderson speak the other day; he was speaking of his church in Minnesota, a church called Wooddale Church. He was talking about how the Holy Spirit took them by the scruff of the neck and turned them right around and said, “We need to be a church that reaches out.” So what they did was they listed all the assets of their church – whether they were pews, hymnbooks, musical instruments, photocopiers, they listed them all – and then they listed all the programs that they had, and they asked the question “Of what these things do, do they reach out?” And he said, “If they didn’t reach out, we threw them out or we sought to transform them.” He said, “We began to think of our building: How does our building operate? How can we use our building as an outreach vehicle? We came to the decision not to rent out our building to any Christian organization. So he got a call. The first caller said, “Hello, Pastor Leith Anderson. We’d like to use your building.” He said, “Are you a Christian organization?” They said, “Yes.” “Well, sorry, we can’t rent our building to you.” He said he got a few raised eyebrows on that. But what happened was that groups like Alcoholics Anonymous began to use the building, the local business association came in and used the building and hosted seminars on leadership and how to do sales talks. Then he had others. He had the Minnesota Vikings come and want to use their big gym; so the Minnesota Vikings came in and practised in their gym. The Minnesota Vikings cheerleaders actually came in, and they also did practices in their gym (they were closed practices - not everyone was allowed to go!) He said he had people come in who found out that the church was a place where they could feel at home; they knew where the washrooms were, they knew where to hang up their coats, they knew the church. Isn’t that what we do with our drop-in on Wednesdays? That’s what we seek to do with the youth coming into this place, that this is a comfortable place, this is a place where they are welcome. We want to take it a step forward now. We want to hire a worker and be a little more intentional in presenting the Gospel to them. But that’s one of the goals behind our high school lunch drop-ins on Wednesdays. I wonder, if we started asking that question, “How does this program or tool or musical instrument, or whatever we have, help us to reach out?” I read Tony Campolo this week again, in his book called It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Comin’. He makes a point in there that churches in North America, the institutionalized church, on the whole gives money to itself. He says, “We come, we put our money in the offering plate, but we are essentially giving money to ourselves. We put that money in the offering plate in order to put stained glass windows and make our sanctuary look nice. We put money in the offering plate in order to buy musical instruments so that our worship will be good. We put money in the offering plate so that we can offer good curriculum to our Sunday school. All of it is for ourselves.” He makes the point that while we do need to look after people and nurture them in the faith we have to be careful that we do not use all our resources for ourselves. He says, just step back and think about how we give money to ourselves and let’s think about how maybe we could begin doing things for others in order to make Him known. So I got thinking. I think about our Sunday school picnic. That is a good thing. But I wonder if, instead of a Sunday school picnic, why don’t we do sort of a barbeque carnival and the same money we pour into our Sunday school picnic for ourselves and for our kids to enjoy a nice afternoon, why don’t we do that for our neighbours? Why don’t we put on a picnic for our friends, invite them over and say, “We’re having a free barbeque. Come on over”? Or we have our church work day. That’s a good day. We all get together and we spruce up, we fix up the church, we plant some plants. How about, instead of doing that – or as well as – we go over to our neighbour here – he has a pile of dirt on his front yard. Have you seen it? I pass by it every day, and I think, wouldn’t it be neat if, instead of a church clean-up day, we all arrived at his door with shovels and wheelbarrows in hand and we said, “We’re here to move that pile of dirt for you”? Wouldn’t that be an outreach? Can we start thinking that way, to know Him and to make Him known, that we are purposeful in sharing the love of Christ with those around us. That’s our vision. That’s our goal. This morning, in your bulletin, there is an affirmation of our vision. We are going to ask you this morning to read that as a body in unison:
Copyright MBC and Tom Cullen - September 2003 |
