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Boy, our culture is crazy! Are they not? That would be an understatement. But all of us were just like them. We were all following the Prince of the Power of the Air, until God saved us with the message of the Gospel of Christ, when we understand the text.
You're listening to When We Understand the Text, committed to sound teaching of the Word of God. For questions and comments, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com. And don't forget our website, www .tt .com.
Here's our host, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky.
And hello, everybody. Thanks for joining me for the broadcast today. We are in Romans Chapter 14 once again. If you want to open up your Bibles and join with me there. But first, I just got to mention this, because Dr. Al Mohler is taking some time off.
He won't be back on the briefing again until August. This is the way seasons of the briefing work. But man, did he miss a big news day yesterday. And of course, dominating the headlines was the announcement by the FBI that no criminal charges were going to be brought against Hillary Clinton for the email scandal.
Not that they cleared her of any wrongdoing. On the contrary, we know more now today than we knew two days ago that she absolutely lied and she absolutely broke the law. Hillary Clinton said, I did not email any classified material to anyone.
That's a direct quote. The FBI said there were 110 classified emails. Hillary said, I provided all my emails to this investigation. The FBI said there were several thousand that were not included in the 30 ,000 that they had received.
Hillary said that I used only one device, and that was something she kept saying over and over again, that it was just more convenient for her to use one device instead of sending and receiving emails through several devices.
Well, the FBI concluded she used several devices and some of those devices were compromised and may have been hacked from the outside. Hillary said, we did what we should have done. And the FBI said, no, they were extremely careless in everything that they did.
And yet James Comey, the director of the FBI, has said that no criminal charges are going to be brought against Hillary Clinton. He was even sure to say that if this had happened to anyone else, they would be facing criminal prosecution, but not Hillary Clinton, which is an incredible perversion of justice.
We also had a story that came out last night and people are crying injustice over this. Alton Sterling, a black man that was pinned down by police and was shot point blank in the chest. This was caught on video.
We also had the story yesterday of the Alliance Defending Freedom filing a lawsuit against the Iowa Civil Rights Commission because the commission believes that it can censor sermons that are coming out of the pulpits in churches in Iowa if they deem any of those sermons to be discriminatory against gays, lesbians and transgenders.
So the kind of sermon that I preached a week and a half ago, LGBT and how the church should respond, responding with the gospel of Jesus Christ and to our sexually depraved culture, that sermon would have been illegal in the state of Iowa, according to the Iowa Civil Rights Commission.
I mean, these are the kinds of injustices that we saw coming out in the headlines just yesterday. That's just talking about yesterday's news. You could probably walk down the block in your community and find other injustices that are going on.
And yet our God has said in his word in Deuteronomy 16 verses 19 through 20, you shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality and you shall not accept a bribe for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous justice and only justice.
You shall follow that. You may live and inherit the land that the Lord, your God is giving you. We read in Romans chapter two, verse 11, that God shows no partiality. And in the context of that statement, God shows no partiality.
He shows no partiality when it comes to judgment for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God for the wages of sin is death. As it says in Romans 6, 23, and all who have sinned will face the righteous wrath of God.
God will show no partiality when it comes to his judgment. But also in the context of that statement in Romans 2, 11, God shows no partiality when it comes to his grace for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and have been justified by his grace through the gift that has been given in Jesus Christ.
Our Lord, Romans 6, 23, again for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. We read in Romans 1, 16, as we opened up the study of this letter, for I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
So no matter who you are, no matter your ethnicity, your skin color, your language, your race, your background, your nationality, no matter what your age, any of these things, none of that will keep you from the love of God in Jesus Christ, our Lord.
He pours out his grace the same on every single person who has been saved in Christ Jesus. So what our culture needs more now than ever is not another hashtag campaign. It's not another awareness month.
Our culture needs the gospel of Jesus Christ. All of us have opinions about the news items that I just highlighted at the beginning of this program, but no matter what it is that we say, whether we're talking amongst our Christian brothers or sisters, or we're talking with somebody who is an unbeliever, the gospel must be on the forefront.
We must be constantly holding out the gospel of Jesus Christ because that is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. Not that we're able to find common ground on any of these social justice issues, but that we hear and believe the gospel of Christ.
And that message is this, though we had broken God's perfect law and what we deserve for that was death. We were guilty of sexual immorality. We have lied, cheated, stolen. We have blasphemed God. We took the very breath that God breathed into us to give us life and we blasphemed him and exalted our own glory instead.
We have worshiped idols, raising to importance things that we considered to be better than or greater than God. And the Bible says that God in his perfect, righteous, holy wrath will judge such sins. But praise God that he didn't leave us dead in our sins.
He sent his son Jesus to die on the cross in our place. It is there on the cross at Calvary that Christ absorbed the wrath of God so that all who are in Christ Jesus, God no longer sees our sin, but he sees the righteousness of Christ.
Not because of any work that we had done because there was no work that we could do to attain right standing with God. Rather, we are loved by God because of the work that Christ has done. We are saved by grace through faith and no other way.
And Jesus did not remain dead and buried in that tomb. Rather, he came back to life and all who are in Christ, we receive his righteousness and also his eternal life. We will live forever if we are in Christ Jesus, our Lord.
That's the gospel message that we must take to this lost and dying world. And we must speak this not only to unbelievers. We must speak this also to believers as well. Because these news stories that I open the program up with, we'll be talking about these things in church, in small groups, in our Bible studies.
And we must speak the gospel even in these groups, into these situations, because it teaches one another how to speak the gospel into these respective contexts. So how is it that we answer these injustices in this world with the gospel?
We learn how to do that when we are together as the body of Christ. And we've been talking about last week and this week in Romans chapter 14, how there are some tertiary issues that we will tend to disagree on, but we must learn how to show charity to one another despite these disagreements.
We have got to stop squabbling over these tertiary matters. It's not that they're unimportant matters, but they are not foundational to this truth of the gospel that we must be proclaiming to one another and to the world.
And so we have got to learn how to show grace to one another, though we're at different levels of maturity and though some will receive one aspect of the law of God and another will see the law in another way.
Paul said clearly in Titus that we are not to quarrel over the law because it does no good. It only ruins the hearers. Rather, we need to show grace to one another over these matters instead of quarreling over these things.
How is it that we come about a spirit of unity? How can we be unified as the body of Christ? We must have a commitment first to sound doctrine. It is in sound teaching that we are unified as the body of Christ.
Truth must come before unity because a sound commitment to the truth will always unify. That's our foundation that we are built upon. But if we place unity first, like if our goal and our ambition is to first be unified and then, you know, maybe we'll come about the truth through that unification, unity does not automatically invoke a commitment to the truth.
We must be foundational upon the truth first. Consider the words that Paul spoke to the Ephesians in Ephesians 4, verse 11. And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, and the teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry.
So who does this begin with first? Begins with God. He, God, gave the apostles and the prophets, essentially the New Testament and the Old Testament. It is through the apostles that we have the New Testament writings.
It is through the prophets that we have the Old Testament writings. The evangelists, those who go out and preach the gospel to those who have yet to hear and plant the churches, the shepherds and the teachers who continue the teaching in those churches to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes, rather speaking the truth in love.
We are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.
How do we come about this level of unity? A commitment to the truth, to sound doctrinal teaching. Before revival can break out in our churches, we must first be reformed. We must be united in the gospel of Jesus Christ and foundational upon that essential truth.
As we have come to this place in Romans 14, we have been laying out sound doctrine before we got here. So then as Paul talks about these tertiary matters, this is being given with the understanding of the sound doctrine that had been laid out beforehand, the sound doctrinal truths of being justified by grace through faith, the doctrines of justification that Paul had been presenting to these Roman Christians.
So then when it comes about these matters that are not essential to salvation, still important theological matters, but they don't pertain to salvation, we need to show charity and love to one another when it comes to talking about these things.
So now I finally get to Romans chapter 14, even though we're 12 minutes into the devotional here. Romans 14 verse 13, therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother.
I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself, but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean. For if your brother is grieved by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love.
By what you eat, do not destroy the one for whom Christ died. So do not let what you regard as good be spoken of as evil. For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
Whoever thus serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men. So then let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding. Verse 15 was where I concluded yesterday. If your brother is grieved by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love.
By what you eat, do not destroy the one for whom Christ died. And very simply, what I said yesterday is we need to be putting others needs ahead of our own, not digging in our heels, not staking our claim and making sure that we win every single argument.
But we must understand that those of us who are mature have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak. We read that in Romans 15, 1. For we who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.
Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up. And let me tell you, when we exercise this in the body of Christ, this does not mean that you say to another person, well, I'm more mature than you are, so you've got to listen to me.
No, no, no, no, no. Might even be the kind of a situation where as you are having a particular discussion and things start to kind of develop into a quarrel, you are mature enough to kind of head that off at the past, head that off at the past and say, hang on, I think we need to take a step back, cool off a little bit, maybe go back to our Bibles, study these things, then we'll come back and talk about it again.
But in your heart, knowing that, that you have a greater maturity in your understanding of these things than your brother does. And so you are looking out for him, not letting this develop into a quarrel, even for his sake, not having to lay the smacketh down on what you think the truth of this particular matter to be, if it's a non-essential matter, okay?
Just take a step back. You don't have to win the argument, but show charity to your brother and grow him in matters of maturity. In Romans 12, 3, we had previously read, for by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
So let us look out for one another in these ways. Let us continue to encourage one another in foundational truths, first being grounded upon the sound doctrine of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then as we approach some of these tertiary matters, we will be able to do so with even more love and grace, because we are all recipients of the same grace of God through the gospel of Christ.
So coming back again to these injustices that we are seeing happen in the world, this is the result of the moral relativism that our culture has clung to and has preached for so many years. You can believe what you want to believe, and I'll believe what I want to believe, and we can both be right, which is absolute foolishness.
No one can possibly develop a proper worldview clinging to that kind of philosophy. And yet it's because of that moral relativism that we have gotten to this place where this person who breaks the law can get away with it, while this person who breaks the law is going to suffer way more than they should have to.
This is a culture that is built upon nothing foundational. It's built upon quicksand. And when the storms are coming, being dashed against this house that has been built by our forefathers, it is being dashed apart against the rocks because it is not built upon a solid rock.
We who are the church of Jesus Christ are built upon a foundation of the gospel of Christ. And so where we are rock solid, and we should be no longer infighting, none of this squabbling, but we are grounded by sound doctrine.
We are looking out and we're seeing people that are being dashed against the rocks because their philosophy just does not stand up against reality. It will not stand up against the righteous justice of God.
And so we must come to them with the gospel so that they will know this foundation and be grounded upon a foundational truth on which to stand, on which they will be saved. Let us speak the gospel into this lost and dying world, not standing upon this rock that we are on going, boy, I'm sure glad I'm not them.
But being filled with compassion and realizing that now more than ever, they need to hear the gospel today. God, I pray that you would continue to grow us in these things, that we would mature according to your gospel, that we would mature one another, no longer being tossed to and fro by every shifting wind of doctrine, no longer being children, but solid men and women of God, passionate about the word of God, that we may speak it into our culture.
And as we look at some of the things that are happening in our culture, related to Hillary Clinton yesterday, I pray that she would be repentant of her sins and her lies and that she would know the gospel of Christ and trust in Jesus for salvation.
I pray for the Alton Sterling family as they are mourning the loss of a loved one and also for the officers that were involved in this particular case. We pray for churches in Iowa that they would continue to stand boldly upon the gospel even in the face of this persecution that is coming from their state government.
And Lord, I pray that we would know how to respond with the gospel of Christ when people ask questions about these particular issues or we hear these issues come up. We know how to properly word the gospel in such a way that it makes sense to a person and maybe even hearing it for the first time, they understand the need to repent of sins and trust in Christ as Savior and Lord.
And we pray these things in his name. Amen.
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