Book of Romans, 15:7-12 - The Imperatives of Romans 15, Pt. 2 (06/26/2022)

All right, guys, good to see all of you. And if you're out there in internet land, we're not set up for baptizing and preaching.

So we had to move the camera around a little bit. So thanks for bearing with us. And that was a joy.

She came up out of the water and she said, that was awesome. And it's like a, it's kind of like a time of starting everything new.

It's almost like you've been practicing and now you're off the bench, you're in the game with Jesus. You got his uniform on, you're ready to go.

And she was feeling it. So that's really cool. I love that. All right. Well, thank you,

Dave Huber, for taking our adult Sunday school class this morning and great job.

You just kind of picked up right where we think brother Bill had said he was going to go in the Psalms. And so we covered

Psalm chapter two, verses one and two. And Dave's about like me.

He's going through every word. So I like that. I like to get down into the depths of things and appreciate it less this morning.

So if you guys can come at 10, come at 10, because we have a good

Sunday school program going for you there. Lots of good in -depth Bible study. All right.

Well, let's turn to Romans chapter 15 and verse five. Yeah, I was hearing what you were saying about the school, brother

Paul. It's like brother Otis said years ago when he first came, we had a few people that left the church because they didn't like brother

Otis. And he said, brother David, they weren't supposed to be here anyway. And so that's how it works.

The ones that are supposed to be here are here. And the ones that will be in the school will be here this fall. You know that, but it's just, it's amazing to watch, isn't it?

And you never know the whys. It's just how the Lord has it planned. And there you go.

So, but I bet enrollment will still be higher than the space you have, which is unfortunate.

We need more space. And hopefully the Lord, you know, his timing is a little different than ours, but I bet he's got that in his plans.

All right. So how's everybody doing today? Everybody up today or tired today?

I can't tell which, because I was not in here. I wasn't watching you already. So if you act really tired, it makes the sermon shorter.

If everybody talks and he acts it up, it makes it longer. So everybody relax, right?

Because you don't want it too long. Okay, well, we've been in Romans chapter 15 and the first few verses down through about verse five covered some what

I call imperatives where in the New Testament, I mean, we're not under the law, we know that, but there are things called imperatives.

And in English and in Greek, what that means is it's like the Lord says, hey, if you are saved, then

I want you to live like this. Do this and don't do that. Do this and don't do that. Like be kind one to another, gentle hearted, forgiving one another.

Things like that are all through the New Testament. Those are called imperatives. It's how we're supposed to live. It doesn't mean that you have to do those things to get saved.

All of those are effects of your salvation. That makes sense?

The cause of your salvation is when the Holy Spirit opens your eyes to the fact that you need a savior and let you see him for who he is and makes you desire him.

And Romans 10, 13 in the Greek says, whosoever desires to call upon the name of the

Lord shall be saved. Because you don't have that desire in the flesh. So if you ever have that desire to be saved and have

Jesus as your Lord and savior is because the Holy Spirit has already regenerated you.

He has opened your eyes. He's given you, he's quickened you from the dead. And so therefore salvation is of God, not of man.

It's totally of God. Man can't save himself. It wouldn't be good news if you had to make a decision out of the blue to get saved when you don't want

Christ anyway. The good news is that the Lord wakes you up because he loves you.

He loved you first. Therefore we love him, right? That's the order it goes in. It's all through the

Bible. And so therefore the great cause of salvation is God's love. And what

Jesus did on the cross for us is finished work. He died in our place, took our sins upon himself and removed them from us, gave us his righteousness.

And then some 2000 years later, here we are. And it's everybody's spiritual birthday.

Whenever that was for each of you, the Holy Spirit woke you up and quickened you and made you see, I need

Jesus. And when you saw that and felt it for the first time you were saved by God, not by yourself, not by your decision like people teach in churches now, it wasn't your decision that saved you.

It was God that saved you. Your decision is an effect of that. Every decision you make for the

Lord is an effect of that salvation. And so even baptism, deciding that you want to get baptized is because you're saved or you wouldn't want to do that.

Someone would have to make you do it if you weren't saved. But when you get saved, you want to do it. And so there are imperatives here in this first part of chapter 15.

In verse one, we saw that we're supposed to bear the infirmities of the weak. If there are weak among us in the church, we need to help them.

The second part in verse two was we need to do things that lift people up and build them rather than tear them down.

That's just how we're supposed to be if we're saved. Doesn't mean we're all perfect at this all the time because we're not.

And some of us have natures that are more helpful and kind and gentle than others, but even the others need to learn to be kind and gentle and all that.

So we all have gifts where we're strong in some points, weak in others, but even on the weak side of where we are, we need to boost those up and get better at that because these are all traits that are like Jesus and we want to be like him.

So Jesus is one who always would build up his people. Now he didn't build up the

Pharisees, did he? What did he do with them? He rebuked them, but they're tears.

They're not God's people. Anybody that was God's child, including Peter, when Peter denied him three times,

Jesus was always gentle with him. Isn't that interesting? Gentle, kind, very careful in how he spoke to them because he knew how to open their minds and get them to do what he knew would be best for them.

And so that's what this is talking about is how to be more like Christ. So you do things that lift up and build up the people, the

Christian brothers and sisters that are around you. And then in verse four, it talked about the importance of the Old Testament as far as how it sheds light on the

New Testament and all of the main doctrines. In fact, every doctrine of the New Testament is also found in the

Old Testament because it speaks of Christ as well all the way through. And so we see there in verse four, the importance of studying the

Old Testament too, because it will shed light on Jesus Christ and everything we've learned in the New Testament.

And then the fourth thing is we saw there in verse five, I think this is what we covered last time, is the scripture says we're supposed to be like -minded.

And what's interesting about that word itself in the Greek, it doesn't just mean like -minded in Greek, it means of like mind and like voice.

So we speak the same and we think the same. Now, we're not gonna agree on every little tiny detail of the

Bible, but as we understand the 10 proper rules of proper Bible interpretation, those little things we may differ on will begin to disappear and we'll see things more and more the same as we study the scripture together using the right rules of Bible interpretation.

We stop cheating just to win an argument. Who cares about that? We just wanna know the truth together. So as we seek truth together, properly understanding and interpreting the scripture with the help of the

Holy Spirit, who is the author of it, then we begin to see things more eye to eye.

And that's where we become like -minded. The church that studies the most together under the influence of the

Holy Spirit will be more like -minded than one that doesn't. And so we covered those things already.

We saw in verse six that the whole purpose of why we're supposed to be like -minded is because that brings glory to God.

And it's all about bringing glory to God. Really, if you look at Jesus's life, it's kind of two, you can boil it down to two major things, bringing glory to God and people, taking care of people, not bringing glory to people, but bringing glory to God and taking care of people, helping people, being kind to people, meeting the needs of people and so forth.

All right, so we kind of see those things. And I think we mentioned last time in John 13, 34, a new commandment

I given to you that you love one another as I have loved you. And by this shall all men know that you're my disciples.

So when we build people up, when we are like -minded, we get along with each other, it glorifies

God because it shows people that we're real. We really are real Christians and that God is real and he's powerful and he has changed us from being people that aren't that way to where now we are that way.

And people can see it. People know if we get saved later in life, like I did, I was 24 when I got saved, the buddies

I hung out with in college back then, they saw a difference in me almost to the week that I got saved.

Some of them did not like the difference, so I didn't always have those friends forever. And then others, some of them got saved.

So, you know, that's kind of how that works. All right, so then in verse seven, we went into this last time a little bit, it says, receive one another.

And that doesn't make a lot of sense, really, when you read that at first, unless you understand that Paul was always speaking to Jews and Gentiles.

And back in those days, it was almost like racial problems that we can have, only it wasn't really racial, it was religious.

It was, I guess, religious racism. The Jews didn't really think God would save a Gentile. That means almost everybody in this room would not be saved if they were right about that.

But Paul told them again and again, you are wrong about that. Jesus Christ came and died for all kinds of men, he said, not just Jews, right?

And so that's what it means. In that context, when you see him say to a congregation, it's got

Jews over here and Gentiles over here, because usually they probably didn't sit together unfortunately in the congregation, is he says, receive one another.

In other words, receive one another as equals is what he was telling the Jews and the

Gentiles. So let me get you to turn to Galatians chapter three, verse 27, did we do this last time?

Did I go as far as Galatians three? If you don't remember, then it's fair game for me to go there again, right?

All right, means you've forgotten it anyway. So, okay, so Galatians 3, 27, for as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, you see that? Paul is teaching them once you're saved, you're not

Jew or Greek, you're part of a heavenly race. You're part of God's race. Your human parents are not even so much where your genes come from anymore.

You've been re -gene, you've been born again, and now you're God's child and you're part of that race and the color of our skin means nothing about that.

It's rather we're born again. And if we're born again, we're part of the same race. And that's what Paul is saying is neither

Jew nor Greek. And there is neither bond nor free. You can be a slave or not be a slave, but in Christ, you're free.

You may still have to serve your master if you were a slave back then, but you're free indeed.

And there's neither male or female. And that just means with regard to God, God does not consider the man to be more important than the woman.

When we're saved, now on the earth back then in particular, the men pretty much lorded it over the women.

Listen, the Hebrews and the Arabs, Esau's group, women were not much higher than property.

That's world history and it's Bible history too. You can see it if you read. Now, I think Abraham and Sarah were different.

You can see a difference of love there between them, but still compared to today, women had no rights.

And do you know that Jesus Christ is the first person in the history of humanity that ever changed that?

Jesus Christ was the first person to liberate women. There is neither male nor female, but does the world see that?

Dave, I love what you were teaching in Sunday school day about how the world thumbs its nose at God and everything that's of God and hates it and plots against it.

And I find it so interesting that we have women's liberals all over women's rights and all this stuff.

All these liberal people don't even know God. Most of them are atheists or agnostics, many of them anyway, are liberal who claim to be

Christian, but they don't really know their head from a hole in the ground with regard to anything that this book says.

They don't know this book, a lot of them. And so, and yet they want women's rights and they don't understand that it wasn't

Muhammad. It wasn't Buddha. It wasn't Moses. It was

Jesus Christ that brought rights to women. So why don't they join our club and become

Christians? Because they can't unless the Holy Spirit calls them. Right? And they hate it anyway.

They don't choose it. They don't want it. And yet they want women's rights. And so being a born again

Christian and living by this book gives the women in this room more rights than they ever had in the history of the world.

And it gives you the highest level there is in humanity. And that is that your husband has to love you like Christ loved the church.

And that is hard to do because we're not Christ. We're little Christ. We're not, we don't have all the whole package of Christ.

We have each different strengths and weaknesses, but we're mandated to love you like Christ loved the church, which means to die for you.

Now, the more we can do that, the more you will follow the husband and support the husband and love the husband, admire the husband and all the things the scripture says the woman is supposed to do.

But when it comes to your relationship with God, there is no difference between the man and the woman. That's what this verse says.

When you're praying and the Holy Spirit, and he's already lives in you, but he comes down upon you and he's with you and you're in prayer, you are at an equal level with every human being.

And you say, well, duh, right? But I mean, you do know that most of the women in this world don't know that.

Most of the women in this world don't feel that. They don't sense it. They're put down by men and not if you're born again.

So that's a pretty important lesson, wouldn't you say? And then he goes on to verse 29.

And if you be Christ, then you're Abraham's seed and heirs according to promise. So there, he says, there's neither

Jew nor Gentile. He started with that and he ended with that. He said, we're all part of Abraham's promise.

That's how we get saved. Doesn't matter if you're Jew or Gentile, it's all part of that. So then in Romans chapter 15, verse eight, he keeps going and Paul keeps talking to the

Jews. So now we're back in our chapter where our study is. In verse eight, it says, now

I say that Jesus Christ was the minister of the circumcision because of the truth of God.

Now, I want you to understand in English here where it says for the truth of God. In Greek, that little word for can mean because of.

So you have to kind of let the Holy Spirit let you know what's the best way to use that word.

I think the best way is it should say because of, and it makes sense if you understand it.

So let me read it like this. Now I say that Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision.

That means the Jews, right? Jesus was the minister of the Jews because of the truth of God.

Now, listen to this, to confirm the promises made to the fathers. So one reason

Jesus came, lived his life and taught a lot of the legal stuff he taught.

Basically the Sermon on the Mount was for the Jews. It's not really Christian material in the truest sense of the word because he was still living under the law when he preached it.

And you know what most of it is? If you don't, it's not hard for me to argue with you about that if you want to debate that.

I know you don't, but I don't know everybody out there. I think probably you don't either. But if you wanted to debate it, it's not hard because if you want to live by the

Sermon on the Mount, then gentlemen, if you ever looked at a woman and lusted at her, you should poke that eye out because it would be better for you to go to heaven with only one eye than to go to hell with two when you one time looked at a woman inappropriately.

That's what he taught. He said, if you hate a brother, you killed him, you murdered him, you ain't going to heaven, right?

So listen, if you really think the Sermon on the Mount is for Christians, then how do you explain that?

You can't live that way. So how do you explain that? Well, the way you explain it is that was

Jesus telling the Jews in the audience, look, here is how you would have to live if you want to live without me, your

Messiah. If you want to live without me dying for you and taking your sins away and grace and me saving you by mercy and grace, and you want to live by the law, then if you look at a woman and lust after her, you should pluck your eye out.

If your hand steals something from brother, you should cut that hand off because that's the only way you get to heaven if you're going to live by the law.

So what is he really teaching them? You can't live by the law and get to heaven, so don't, follow me. Let me be your savior.

Let me die on the cross, take your sins away and give you my righteousness. And so the father is pleased with you because he sees me in you.

He sees my righteousness imputed to you as if it was yours. And he sees your sins given to me as if they were mine and I die for them.

That's the only way you're getting saved, Mr. Jew. And that's what the Sermon on the Mount's about. Isn't that interesting?

How many people in churches around, especially Baptist church, you think even know that? You know, people don't study enough, but you just have to think.

Like, have you ever thought when you read that about cutting your hand off? Wait a minute, Jesus just said, I have to do that.

How come no one in church is doing that? Have you ever thought that? When I was first saved, I used to think stuff like that.

Luckily, I didn't think I had to live by it, but I mean,

I did think about it. So this is where Paul is saying, look,

Jesus came for the Jews because of the truth of God to fulfill and confirm the promise of Abraham, which by the way, was a covenant of grace, not law.

Abraham came 400 years before Moses. Moses was the law. And that's what Jesus is saying. You can't live by and get saved.

You just can't do it. You can't keep them all. And you'd have to keep them all to get saved by the laws of Moses. So you gotta go back prior to that, to the

Abrahamic covenant, the unconditional covenant, where God just does all the work and saves us.

And that's what Jesus fulfilled. And that's what 15 .8 here in Romans means that the first thing

Jesus did was he came as a minister of the Jew to fulfill the Abrahamic covenant and the laws of Moses.

And the prophecies of the prophets that all said he was coming and when he was coming and the city he would be born in and that he would be born of a virgin and all of that had to be fulfilled.

That's the first reason he came. And that's what the first part of verse eight means. But now look at verse nine. There's a second purpose in the life and death and burial and resurrection and ascension in the heaven of Jesus Christ.

There's a second purpose and verse nine talks about it. And that the Gentiles might glorify

God because of his mercy. Now you notice something here. The Jews had to have something that related to the law or they just weren't gonna buy into it.

For one thing, this is why God gave the apostles sign gifts.

They could literally raise the dead. They could touch people and heal them. They could impart the

Holy Spirit by touching people. They could prophesy stuff and say day after tomorrow this is gonna happen.

Why did God let the apostles and the people surrounding the men and women of God surrounding them that were telling this new gospel that the

Jew had never heard? Why did he give them this power? Because the Jew requires a sign and never would have believed.

How many of you think they would have believed Jesus and the apostles if they could do no miracles that the

Jews would believe them? Do you think they would believe them at all? Did you know that's the same reason

God gave Moses the ability to take a cane and throw it down and it becomes a snake? And to pick the snake up and it becomes a cane again?

Why did God let Moses do that? How come you can't do it? Because God is not entrusting you with bringing a new dispensation of truth to the world.

If he were, you could do it. But this is why the whole charismatic movement is false. It's fake.

It's not the Holy Spirit doing these tongue speaking and faith healing and all these things that they say is not the

Holy Spirit. Because in Hebrews chapter one, verse one, he said, I'm not doing that anymore that way. And he can't lie.

So it's not him, it's some other spirit or it's just a learned response if you wanna give people the benefit of the doubt.

But the thing is there was a time when the message had to be authenticated. So here

Jesus came to authenticate the message to the Jew, but the

Gentile does not require a sign, the Bible says. The Gentile wants knowledge. And the Gentile is not going to be living by the law that the

Jew thought he had to live by. But Jesus says, no, but I came to fulfill the law on your behalf. I will fulfill the law, but then you have to receive me as your

Lord and savior or else you got to do it yourself, which you can't. And he proved it with the Sermon on the Mount and other sermons he preached.

So now, verse nine says, but here's the other reason I came. The Gentile is not gonna get saved by the law.

He's only gonna get saved by mercy, by God just being merciful and gracious to the

Gentile because Jew and Gentile, the truth. How many of you really think any Jew ever kept the law?

You really think they kept it? They talked about keeping it, but you really think they kept it? None of them kept it either.

So if Jesus had not died on the cross and taken the sins of all of God's people, I don't mean everybody in the world, but the ones that God knew from the foundation of the world,

Ephesians chapter one, if he hadn't taken their sins upon himself and died, no one, Jew or Gentile, no one would have been saved.

But since he did take their sins upon himself and die and pay for all of them, even the ones you have not done yet, because he did that and the father received it, that's called propitiation.

God said, I'm satisfied that the sin debt is paid in full. And then he gave us his righteousness.

And when the father sees us, he sees Jesus, therefore he saves us. If that hadn't happened, nobody would be saved, not

Jew or Gentile. But Jesus did come to fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament and of the times of Moses and even before that, all the times of the prophets.

And he fulfilled that, but he also brought the grace and the mercy to the Gentile. And he came so that the

Gentiles might glorify God. Now here we see the word for, because of is a better translation, so listen to it.

And that the Gentiles might glorify God because of God's mercy on them.

You get it? The Gentile finds himself saved, the Holy Spirit calls him and he opens his eyes and he sees

Jesus and he receives him as Lord and Savior and he's indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And he knows he's saved now and he knows he doesn't deserve it because he never even knew the law, let alone keep it.

Therefore that's mercy, so he gives glory to God. So that's the second reason Jesus came, was to save the

Gentiles. For as it is written, now Paul is gonna quote the Old Testament and he's talking to the

Jews. Why would you think he would quote the Old Testament? Because they can identify with the Old Testament, right?

So he quotes the Old Testament. He says, for this cause, as it is written, for this cause,

I will confess to thee among the Gentiles and sing unto thy name. So the

Old Testament said that when the Messiah came, he would confess God to the

Gentiles, not just the Jews. And Paul is reminded the Jew of that because the Jew said, he won't save a Gentile. He said, well, your book says he will.

You've been studying Isaiah. Isaiah said he came to save the Gentiles. What do you think about that,

Mr. Jew? This is how Paul preached. He got right in their face very meekly, but he nailed it.

Like they could not refute him. I think of Charles Spurgeon. If you ever read Spurgeon, you would never wanna be arguing against him in a debate because he would very calmly and meekly just lay the truth out like it is and you'd be sunk.

Well, this is how Paul was. Paul didn't have to be eloquent. He didn't have to be rude. He didn't have to raise his voice.

He just laid it out, laid the facts out there. Your book, the Old Testament says that the

Messiah would come for the Gentiles. He would confess among the

Gentiles. He would sing in God's name in front of the Gentiles. And again, the

Old Testament says, rejoice ye Gentiles with his people. Who's his people?

That's the Jews. Rejoice you Gentiles with the Jews because now there's neither

Jew nor Gentile. It's one God, one savior. He died for our sins. We can sing praises to him together.

And he's telling the Jews this because they don't believe it. And he's quoting their book, the Old Testament, the book of the

Hebrews. So verse 10 says, and again, so he kept nailing them.

He just kept punching them point after point after point so that they couldn't even begin to answer the first one, let alone all of these.

Again, in the Old Testament says, rejoice ye Gentiles with his people. And again, verse 11, praise the

Lord, all you Gentiles and laud him, all ye people. And verse 12, and again,

Isaiah said, now Paul's quoting Isaiah, there shall be a root of Jesse, that's

Jesus. We all know that's the Messiah. And Jesse was David's father, right? And David is the line of the

Messiah. And Jesus will sit on David's throne in Jerusalem when he comes for a thousand years, when he comes at the second coming.

And again, Isaiah says there will be a root of Jesse and he that shall rise to reign over the

Gentiles. In him shall the Gentiles trust. Man, he pretty much beat the

Jews up that day, didn't he? He totally eliminated their false belief that God only saved

Jews. And that's what all of that was about. Now, if we went to Isaiah 11 and verse 10, we see where that direct quote came from, that Paul was literally quoting from Isaiah 11, verse 10.

And in that day, there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people.

Do you know what an ensign is? It's kind of a battle banner. It's like a flag in battle where your soldiers follow the guy that's got that flag.

I never would have wanted to be the guy carrying the flag, would you, David? You don't have a gun, you got a flag and you're on the front going into battle.

But people did it. You know why? Because it rallied the troops. It helped you win the battle.

And so Jesus is that ensign, all right? So this root of Jesse, root of David, Jesus Christ, the

Messiah will stand as a battle banner. Boy, do we ever need that in this day of spiritual warfare in our personal lives, right?

Of the people. Now, that phrase, the people, David, is the one you were studying in Sunday school, which can be translated

Gentile. It can be translated heathen if you wanna lift up brother

Bill, who we lost. He always put an R in it, right? And we loved it.

Okay, so it can be translated any of those things. So this is talking about the Gentiles again. To this banner,

Jesus Christ, shall the Gentiles seek. Now, this is what Paul was quoting to these

Jews that didn't think God would save the Gentiles. It's really kind of funny. And his rest, that word rest is the same word as Sabbath.

Think about that. His Sabbath shall be glorious.

You know why? Because it's every minute of every day instead of only Saturday like the Jews thought it was.

The true Sabbath is every minute of every day because we rest in Jesus because we don't have to keep the law because we can't.

We don't have to be saved by the law because we can't. So we rest in him and in his righteousness and we live our lives so thankful that we do try to keep these imperatives that are in Romans chapter 15.

And in other places, all through the New Testament, be ye kind one another, one's on my mind lately.

We don't have to keep that to get saved. We try to live that because we are saved. We're thankful that we're saved and therefore we try to do what

Jesus wants us to do and what pleases him. And it does not please him when we do the negative side of those imperatives.

If he tells us to lift one another up and we tear each other down, that does not please the Lord Jesus.

I wanna tell you something. God does not see your sins at all, the father. He does not see it. Like if you said, father, forgive me my many sins, he'd say, what sins?

I'm totally convinced of that from scripture. But Jesus is God with us. He is that part of God that lives in time and space and he sees everything we do and hears everything we say.

And when we tear down a brother or a sister in Christ in particular, rather than building them up, let me tell you something.

Jesus has taken notes. Now his timing is different than ours, but there's a payday someday.

That was a great old sermon preached in the South by who was it? Charlotte Myron used to quote him all the time.

The names of Jesus. You remember who? I know the pastor's name. I just forgot. You're a blank on it.

She has stuck it in my notes. But anyway, there's a payday someday for Christians.

It doesn't mean with regard to heaven or hell, we're going to heaven, but it means with regard to your rewards.

And we have a judgment seat of Christ where we have to answer for everything we did in this body as Christians.

And people don't preach about that, talk about it. We don't even think about it. We don't like to think about that. So this is why we should keep these imperatives.

When you see Jesus say, well, live like this, it's not a suggestion, really. It's like, we're gonna talk about this again after I come and get you.

And we're gonna have a personal one -on -one talk about your whole life and whether you did that imperative or not, or this or why.

Think about that is real, okay? So with the

God who created the universe, we're going to answer those questions. Maybe that's prior to the marriage supper when we get to celebrate.

I don't know when that happens. I just know it happens. I can, we can probably figure it out. We can probably figure it out with further study on the sequence of the end times things, but I almost broke my pulpit.

Calm down for the day. All right. So to this ensign will the

Gentiles seek and his rest shall be glorious. And it shall come to pass in that day that the

Lord will set his hand again a second time to recover the remnant of his people.

I'm not going to get to a lot of my study for today because we'll run out of time and that's okay because we'll just pick it up next time the

Lord willing. But it's going to name in this passage all the different parts of the globe that God's going to bring his

Jews from and bring them back to the promised land. It names the places. It literally names

United States. So that'll be a surprise for you if you have to come back next Sunday. I'll show you where it names the

United States in the Bible because most people don't think it does. All right. So that was

Fern, she woke up. What was it Ben said when?

Yeah, he was sitting up here with her and he knew it was coming and he started running towards the back and he altered ticking time bomb.

Was that at Nana's thing? That was, that's awesome. Bet Nana was laughing from heaven.

That the Lord shall set his hand again a second time to recover the remnant of his people. This has already happened once.

Do you remember when the first time God brought his people back to the promised land from the

Babylonian captivity, right? Remember that? They rebuilt the walls and all that stuff.

Well, there's going to be another time he does it and it's in our future. And it's really already started.

It started in, when was it? 19 what? When Israel became a nation again, 1947, was it?

48. And it started there, but it's continuing and it's going to get bigger and bigger.

And then when Jesus comes at the second coming, Paul said, all Israel shall be saved. Every Jew that's still on the earth alive and breathing will bow their knee and receive him as their

Messiah. And all of Israel will be brought back to the promised land and Jesus will reign from there for a thousand years on this earth.

And we know that from scripture. And so this is what, this is a reference to, a reference to in Isaiah chapter 11, verse 11, that the

Lord shall set his hand again a second time to recover the remnant of his people. He's going to bring them back to the promised land.

And that's something, and I want to tell you something. The promised land is a lot bigger than the little modern nation of Israel.

They have not taken all the land that Abraham, that God gave Abraham yet, but they will.

I mean, it's going to include Jordan. It's going to include Syria. It's going to include, what's the one up to the

Northwest? West, Beirut, Lebanon. It's going to include

Lebanon. It's going to include some of Egypt, like the Sinai Peninsula. Did I say

Syria? So it's going to be bigger than it is now. It's going to have to be to hold all the

Jewish people to come back. And some of the Gentiles probably want to go live there because Jesus is on the throne there.

I want to be sitting close to him somewhere, don't you? So it's got to hold some Gentiles too.

Which shall be left, all these people that will be left, like Paul said, all Israel shall be saved from, now it names the towns and I don't, the cities.

I don't have time to go into this. So I'm going to skip that for now. So what we see in Romans chapter 15 here is that Paul ends up in this little part here with verse seven, receive you one another.

He's talking about the Jew receiving the Gentile and the Gentile receiving the Jew. But we can bring that to our level and our day to day, put it on a racial level because in America, I don't think we have as bad of a race problem as the

Democrats want us to think we do because they try to get votes that way by lying about it.

But I know here in Texas, we don't have a bad racial problem here. Certainly not like it was even in the fifties.

It's changed a lot for the better. But here's the thing, as Christians, once we were born again, there's no color.

There's no race. There's only the heavenly race that we just got brought into.

We got regened and we're part of God's race now. So there is no racial difference whatsoever.

There's no difference between male and female and no difference between Jew and Gentile and so forth. So that's kind of the application of this verse for us today.

And unfortunately, all the cool stuff I was going to tell you about this, I have to wait till next time. Because it's real interesting when you look at verse 11 there in Isaiah 11, where it names these nations that these

Jews come from to relate that to the nations of today. So we'll talk about it a little bit next time. Let's stand and have prayer together.

Lord, thank you so much for this day. Thank you for Jaylynn getting baptized and it was such a big event for her and for all of us.

And Lord, thank you that you bring people in one at a time to your kingdom. We're all an important individual.

We don't come in as groups. We come in as individuals. And Lord, thank you that because you're outside of time, you can spend an eternity with each one of us separately and individually.

And so that's amazing to think about. Lord, just thank you for your plan of salvation.

Thank you for this life you gave us to let us live in these bodies and have these five senses that we have to sense the beautiful world that you've created and the universe that you've created.

And thank you most of all though, that you saved us out of a completely fallen human race.

And Lord, help us to spread the word. Help us to be light and salt to the world around us.

Help us to be obedient as your Holy Spirit calls us to talk to people about you. And Lord, we ask you to bless the meal we're about to have together and the fellowship in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, we'll have a meal and all of our visitors are invited to stay and have lunch with us if you can.