WWUTT 1396 Watch Out for Those Who Cause Divisions (Romans 16:17-18)

The Closing Warnings and Greetings in Romans 16

Paul has just spent this letter to the Roman Christians laying out all kinds of sound, good doctrine. And toward the end, he says watch out for anyone who teaches a different doctrine when we understand the text.

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Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study of Romans and we'll finish up Romans this week. Chapter 16. I'm gonna start by reading verses 17 to the end of the book. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome.

I appeal to you brothers to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught. Avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites.

And by smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive. For your obedience is known to all so that I rejoice over you. But I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil.

The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Timothy, my fellow worker, greets you. So do Lucius and Jason and Sosepater, my kinsmen. I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord.

Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother, Quartus, greet you. Now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages, but has now been disclosed and through the prophetic writings has been made known to all nations according to the command of the eternal God to bring about the obedience of faith to the only wise God.

Be glory forevermore through Jesus Christ. Amen. So this is the conclusion of Paul's letter to the Romans. And he begins this section with some final instructions and then we have some final greetings.

What we had in chapter 16, verses one through 16 was a mentioning of a number of people who've contributed to the spread of the gospel. And Paul tells the church in Rome to greet them. Here in his final greetings, he mentions those who are greeting the church in Rome.

We have Timothy, we have the person whose penmanship this letter would have been written in, that's Tertius. You have a mention of Gaius, Erastus, and Quartus. And then we have that closing doxology. But this final section here begins with this instruction.

Justification by Faith Alone and the Doctrine of Romans

I appeal to you brothers to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught. Avoid them. Remember that the book of Romans is Paul laying out an argument, unfolding a doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Back to Romans 5 .1, since therefore we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We are justified by our faith in Christ. We are not justified by our works. And that was what Paul laid out for the first 11 chapters in Romans, how we are all sinners fallen short of the glory of God, but we are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

Those are words from chapter three, verses 23 through 25. So as this is what Paul has been laying out over the course of this letter, justification by faith, and then in chapters 12 through 15, how that now looks in the life of a believer.

So you believe in justification by faith. So how is that gonna change a person's life? What does the life of a Christian look like? And so we had application of those doctrines that we read in the first 11 chapters.

And now we are here in the closing, Romans chapter 16. For some, it's kind of a throwaway chapter, but as we had considered last week with some of the greetings that Paul had mentioned there in verses one through 16, we just see this beautiful unity of the church, a diversity of the church, the different persons that God is using for the work of the church and the spread of the gospel.

And now we're gonna have these final instructions. After Paul has so masterfully laid out these beautiful doctrines, exalting Christ, pointing out the sin of man and our need for a savior, after he's painted such a beautiful picture, he says to the church, watch out for those who wanna come and mess it up and beware that there's some imitations that are out there that are not the original.

So he says in verse 17, I appeal to you, watch out for those who cause divisions. They create obstacles by teaching a doctrine that is contrary to what you have been taught. It doesn't flow from the apostolic teaching.

It doesn't come from the teaching of our Lord Christ. And so therefore it's gonna cause division and create obstacles. Paul makes this as an appeal, watch out for false teachers. They will cause division.

It doesn't matter how much they try to dress it up and make this pretty presentation or how many times they use the word unity, false teaching divides. It's incredible the number of people these days who are using that word unity.

It's like, that's the word that they come walking into the discussion with. Well, we need to be unified. We need to be reconciled with one another. We need to be together on this. Biden, I can't remember how many times it was mentioned in his inaugural speech, but he makes this strong appeal to unity when he was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States.

So you'll hear this from politicians, you'll hear this from teachers that we need to be unified. We need to come together. How many teachers do you hear that come in and say, we need to divide each other.

What we need is more division. What teacher in their right mind is gonna say something like that? So just because a person says they want unity, that does not automatically qualify their teaching as good teaching.

What are they teaching? Because what they're teaching may not actually unify at all. It may cause division. Here was what Paul said to Timothy in 1 Timothy 6. I'm gonna begin in verse two. He says, teach and urge these things.

Teach and urge what things? Well, the sound doctrine of the gospel of Christ that Paul had been presenting over the course of the letter, telling Timothy to defend the faith, to not let anyone teach any different doctrine.

And so he goes on in verse three to say, if anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ in the teaching that accords with godliness. So let's stop there for a moment.

So what Christ has taught are sound words. How do we know what right doctrine is? Well, it's what Jesus has taught and what he commissioned his apostles to go out and teach in the name of Christ. What an apostle has said is the word of Christ.

So whether you're reading it from Paul or Peter, or you're reading Jude or James, or you're reading any of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it is part of the apostolic teaching that was going on in the first century because it was taught by those whom Christ had specifically sent.

And they verified their apostleship by personally being appointed to be an apostle by Jesus and also through the signs and wonders that they perform. So you knew that what they were saying came from God because of these miraculous signs and wonders.

Folks, it's one of the reasons why you can automatically write off anybody that comes to you today and claims to be an apostle. Are they raising the dead? If they're not raising the dead, or healing the sick, like legitimately healing the sick, not a person who says, well, I have high blood pressure and an apostle prays over them, and then they come back with a clean bill of health a couple of months later.

That's not healing the sick. We're talking about people who have debilitating, serious diseases that you can see, and a person comes and lays hands on them, and immediately they get up and they're healed.

That's the kind of miraculous healing that was going on at the time of the apostles. And when a person comes along today and claims to be an apostle, but they're not doing any kind of verifiable miracle like that, well, they're not of God.

I mean, we know by what the scripture says that there is not going to be any new revelation these days. The canon is closed. The Bible's complete. It's sufficient. We don't need any other word than what God has given us from the prophets in the Old Testament and the apostles in the New Testament.

This word is complete. It is inerrant. It is sufficient for our every need. So already the scripture is clear on that point. As Peter says in 2 Peter 1, we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed to which we would do well to pay attention.

But then you can also be sure that anybody who comes along claiming to be an apostle is not really that because they're not producing any miracles. That's a good way to respond to such a person who says, well, I'm an apostle.

And what I say is the word of God that has been given to me. And you just simply respond to that person. Well, raise the dead, show me something, do some kind of miracle like Peter and the guys were doing in the book of Acts.

If you can do that for me, then I will believe that God is speaking for you. The response to that is going to be that they don't do any such thing. But even the book of Deuteronomy tells us chapters 13 and 18, if anybody comes along claiming to have a word from God and they tell you to go after other gods, which you have not known, that person is a liar and a deceiver.

And in Israel during the time that the law was given to Moses and the people of Israel, that false prophet would have been stoned to death. If anybody comes along to you and gives you a word that they say came from God and their prophecy doesn't come to pass, they're a false prophet.

That's the test that the Old Testament gives to us as well. So maybe they do perform some kind of sign or a wonder, but they teach you to go after other gods or they give some sort of prophetic utterance that doesn't come to pass.

These are the ways that we know that such a person is a false prophet. Even here, Paul is telling the church, he is warning the church not to follow after those who are gonna cause obstacles and divisions contrary to the doctrine that you've been taught.

So coming back to what Paul had said to Timothy, 1 Timothy 6, three, if anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness.

Okay, so I remember where I was now. So first of all, the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ are that which Christ taught and that which came from his apostles whom he sent. But then Paul says something else about this teaching that it accords with godliness.

In other words, the sound teaching of our Lord Christ is going to produce godliness. That will be the effect of the true words of Christ that a person who listens to these words has them written on their heart, has their thinking and their heart changed by what it is that they are learning from our savior.

They are going to become a more godly person. They will become someone who wants to imitate Christ, to become more like Christ. The teaching of Christ makes a person more like Christ. So the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ accords with godliness.

It produces godliness. And if somebody is teaching anything different, if it doesn't come from Christ, it is therefore not producing godliness, therefore it will not be unifying. It will not bring the people of God together.

It will cause divisions, separations, factions. That's what Paul goes on to explain verse four. If a person does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, then he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing.

He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.

Like using the teaching of Christ to gain for themselves, to gain materially for themselves or fame or popularity for themselves. They're using it for themselves rather than to give glory to God. That's the warning that Paul gives to Timothy.

That is therefore given to the rest of the church. Anyone who teaches anything different than the sound words of our Lord Christ and the teaching that produces godliness is gonna be puffed up with conceit, really understands nothing.

It doesn't matter how wonderful they dress it up, they're full of themselves and they're only in it for themselves. They have an unhealthy craving for controversy and quarrels over words that produce evil suspicions and factions among one another, constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, which is why the teaching is what we need to recognize brings unity, not the person who comes claiming that they're bringing unity.

This description that Paul gives here of false teaching, go back and read it again, 1 Timothy 6, verses four through five. The false teaching that Paul is talking about here or what he describes as false teaching here, this is every kind of false teaching that we encounter in the world today.

In the world of evangelicalism, American churchianity, this is indicative of all that false teaching that we can be bombarded with all over the place. The prosperity gospel, preaching health and wealth, name it and claim it, just say it and then it will be yours.

The reason why you don't have is because you don't claim it. That's kind of part of the whole prosperity gospel. There's also the social justice gospel, which is critical race theory and intersectionality and every other connected philosophy that is encouraging people to discriminate from one another.

See, critical race theory can't unify anybody since its basic tenant is that you need to be discriminatory. We have come a long way from when Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

What is the critical race movement now teaching? Well, consider the words of Abraham X. Kendi. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

The whole bedrock of this cause is to be discriminatory and to elevate certain ethnicities above other ethnicities, to tear this one down and call it the oppressor and say this group is the oppressed and to try to build it up.

And very specifically, we're talking about blacks and whites. So all whites are oppressors, all blacks are oppressed, and we need to tear down the whites to therefore elevate the blacks. And if you're not doing that, then you aren't being Christ-like.

I hear that all the time from the critical race theory proponents. So that's a false gospel. You've also got a very watered down gospel that's very common throughout like the seeker sensitive movement.

They're not gonna say anything that's too offensive. We don't wanna say something or bog you down with anything that might turn you off right away. So we're gonna be as soft peddling with this as possible.

And in so doing really kind of removes some of the more essential things that we need to hear about our sin and need for a savior. And so it becomes a false gospel, though some of the basic tenants of the gospel might be there.

It's so soft peddled, it really has no impact, no effect. And it's trying to win a person by means of comfort. Well, what happens when they don't feel comfortable? If you're gonna win them with appeasing their sensitivities, then you're gonna have to continue to appease those sensitivities in order to keep them in the church.

And that just simply does not work. The most common kind of teaching that I think you're going to encounter, and I should say the most common kind of false teaching is gonna be a teaching that's really piecemealed together.

Like I enjoy this doctrine. I like that doctrine. I don't like this one. Ooh, that one's way too offensive. I do like this doctrine over here. And you kind of collect it all together and create the Christianity that you like.

Now, there are versions of this that are really difficult to sniff out because they're gonna present first those doctrines that are kind of like the litmus test for most people. I need to see this, this, and this to know that it's genuine Christianity.

And so they present that first. You're convinced that it's real, but then as you go through it, you come to find there are some pretty essential doctrines that they are outright dismissing. And this is very common, more common than you might think, that you're gonna be encountering some of those teachers that are dismissing penal substitutionary atonement, the understanding that Christ has paid a price for our sins, that the wrath of God was poured out on him when he died on the cross for us.

They will dismiss the existence of hell. They'll say it's not even an essential doctrine or we can accept differing opinions on this. They will be very critical of male headship and understanding that a man is the head of his household and that a wife is to submit to her husband, that men and men only are supposed to be filling the role of overseer in the church, pastor and elder, and because they question God's roles that he has designated for the sexes, then they're also going to question sex itself.

And some of them saying that we need to be more appeasing to the LGBTQ community. We need to be open to more ideas. We need to practice pronoun hospitality, something that J .D. Greer has appealed for, which means that if a person, if a man decides that he wants to be called a woman, you have to use his preferred pronouns.

This is kind of the piecemealed approach to doing church that we're seeing happen in a lot of American evangelicalism. It tends to be not very confessional. So they don't have confessional statements.

They're not encouraging that you sign like membership confessions and stuff like that. It's just whatever's good for the moment, however we respond to this situation or this scenario, that's the way we're doing our faith these days.

It's being shaped more by the times than it is by the Bible. And that is sure to cause division in the church because we're just kind of going along by our opinions rather than grounding what it is that we believe and what we do in the word of God, which never changes.

It does not change with the times. Our understanding and our exposition of the scriptures is not being determined by what's going on in our present day or in our culture or things like that. Jesus said in Mark 13, 31, heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

And so it is the word of Christ that we are to be grounded in. And that's what Paul does with the Romans. Coming back to Romans chapter 16, is he lays out a foundation of sound doctrine all the way through this letter and says to them, if anybody comes to you preaching something different, they cause division, they create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught.

Avoid such people. Don't listen to them. Don't let their teaching in your church. Certainly don't give them your pulpit. Verse 18, for such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites, just as we read in 1 Timothy chapter six.

And by smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive. In other words, they tell people what they want to hear, smooth words and flattery. It goes back to that like soft peddling gospel that I mentioned a moment ago.

They want to be appeasing to a person, not saying anything too offensive, but notice that Paul says that they cause divisions and create obstacles. They think by soft peddling the gospel that they're removing obstacles.

They're actually making it harder for a person to enter the kingdom of God because what they're hearing is not actually the message of the kingdom of God. These teachers are doing what Paul describes to Timothy as scratching itching ears.

Paul says this to the Philippians chapter three, verse 17, brothers join in imitating me and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. For many of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ.

Their end is destruction. Their God is their belly and they glory in their shame with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven and from it we await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body by the power that enables him to subject all things to himself.

So once again, let me conclude with Romans 16, 17 and 18. That's Romans chapter 16, verses 17 and 18. I appeal to you brothers to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught.

Avoid them for such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites and by smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive. And we'll come back to this again tomorrow with verses 19 and 20.

For your obedience is known to all so that I rejoice over you, but I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Amen.

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