The Importance of the Church Community (Romans 16)

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

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Well today we have come to the last study in our book of Romans.

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We have come to Romans chapter 16.

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In Romans chapter 16 Paul is closing out the book.

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He's already given what could be considered a benediction at the end of chapter 15 when he said, May the God of peace be with you all.

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Amen.

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But then he adds this last portion where he begins to remind the people that he wants to greet that he cares for them.

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And he lists a whole bunch of names.

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He begins with the one who is bringing the letter, Phoebe, who is called a servant of the church of Centuria.

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And then he goes down and he mentions Prisca and Aquila and he mentions the church and their house and all of these different things.

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And he goes down the list.

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Greet this person.

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Greet that person.

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And it's a good reminder to us of the value of community in the church.

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In fact, that's what the church is.

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That's what Ecclesia means.

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The word Ecclesia in the Greek means assembly.

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And so the church is the assembling of the Saints.

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It's what we do when we gather together.

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Very recently we have had a season where the church didn't meet as a result of the virus that had caused churches to stop meeting.

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And many churches are still not meeting now.

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I'm so thankful that we only took a very short amount of time away from the meeting together.

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And now that we're meeting again, I am so thankful.

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But I'm still looking forward to when we can put all of this behind us and we can begin to shake hands and we can begin to to embrace one another.

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And there's no fear of any type of need for social distancing and things like that.

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Because one of the values of the Lord's Day is it's when the Saints come out of the world that we've been trudging through all week long.

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And we come out of the world and we assemble together.

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And we are the church.

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A lot of people during this whole COVID-19 thing have been singing praises to the fact that, oh, we don't need the church building.

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We don't need the church building.

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The church is the church whether it's in the building or not.

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And while there may be some truth to that, we should never discount the value of having a place to come and a people with which to gather.

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It is important that we gather as a church.

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It's important that we greet one another as the body of Christ.

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We should never discount the value of that.

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Because there is no such thing as lone wolf Christianity.

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There is no such thing as doing this by ourselves.

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We need one another.

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We need to be together.

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We need to be in the practice of greeting one another in the Lord.

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And we do that most commonly and most regularly on the Lord's Day.

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We come together to greet one another in the Lord, to encourage one another, to reprove and rebuke, and to encourage and exhort, and to use the Scriptures to do those things that the Scripture says that it is intended to do.

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And we do that when we come together as the body of Christ.

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So I look at Paul's words here and I see all these greetings and I'm reminded of the importance of the community of the church.

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But something else that we see here is he also says to watch out for a certain group of people.

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Because there are those who would try to make their way into the church who would, as he says, cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught.

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So even though it's important that we gather, we have to be careful.

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Because there are people, even within churches, that try to create divisions.

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One thing we should always know for certain is we shouldn't want that to be us.

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We should not be ones who sow seeds of discord.

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It should never be us.

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We should be ones who are encouraging the body in godliness and encouraging people to follow Christ, encouraging people to look to the Savior and to trust in the gospel.

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We should not be people who are sowing seeds of discord.

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And so he calls out that.

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And there's one verse here that I'd really like for you to consider trying to memorize.

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And that is verse 19.

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There used to be a camp song.

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I used to preach it at youth camps and many, many years ago.

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And I remember a camp song.

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It was Roman 1619.

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That was the name of the song.

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And Roman 1619 says, the way the song went, Roman 1619 says, be excellent at what is good, be innocent of evil.

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For the God of peace will soon crush Satan.

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God will crush him underneath your feet.

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So I encourage you to remember that.

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This is an encouragement to the church that we are to be excellent at the things that are good.

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We are to be innocent of the things that are evil.

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And we are to know that God, our God of peace, will one day crush our enemy and he will do so underneath our feet.

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And so we we are so grateful to know the truth that this scripture tells us.

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And again, that's actually verses 19 and 20.

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And it's a little bit of a paraphrase because the actual verse in the ESV says, for your obedience is known to all so that I rejoice over you.

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But I want you also to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil.

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The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.

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The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

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What a wonderful word.

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What a wonderful way to draw this book to a close.

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I hope this study of Romans has been an encouragement to you.

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I look forward to tomorrow when we begin our study of the Gospel of Luke.

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Thank you for watching Coffee with a Calvinist.

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Thank you again for watching.

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My name is Keith Foskey, and I have been your Calvinist.

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May God bless you.