Mar. 25, 2018 AM Jesus Our Pride And Joy by Pastor Josh Sheldon

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Mar. 25, 2018 AM: Jesus, Our Pride And Joy Rom. 15:17-21 Pastor Josh Sheldon

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In chapter 15, our text this morning is verses 17 to 21, but I'll start reading at verse 14, and we need to be reminded just for a brief part of the message this morning, 14 through 16, but the message will be on 17 through 21.
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So Romans 15 beginning at verse 14, again this is the word of the
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Lord, I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to instruct one another.
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But on some point I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the
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Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the
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Holy Spirit. In the beginning of our text this morning, in Christ Jesus then
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I have reason to be proud of my work for God, for I will not venture to speak of anything except what
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Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience, by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the
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Spirit of God, so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum, I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ.
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And thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else's foundation, but as it is written, those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.
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So the Apostle Paul, our author, our inspired author, he's here wrapping up this letter to the
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Romans. The rest of this chapter is going to have to do with his immediate plans and how those in Rome could come alongside him and help him out, and that will
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Lord willing be our text the next time we come back to this in a couple of weeks. We don't know who founded the church in Rome, but we do know it wasn't
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Paul. But nonetheless, so far as they have been built on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles, so long as they are grounded in this gospel of Christ, anticipated for so long and then revealed and concluded in the person and work of Jesus Christ, as long as that is their basis, they, like any other church established on that basis, are an apostolic church, as are we here today at Providence Bible Church, as we hold to this apostolic word, the scripture, the whole counsel of God.
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One of the wonders, though, of the Christian life, I mean, one of the just sheer, childlike, open -eyed wonders of being a
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Christian is knowing this, that God, the God of the universe, this holy
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God that we studied His holiness this morning at Sunday school, this God who created everything by simply the breath of His mouth, because He willed it, all that is came to be, this
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God works through ordinary means. He works through ordinary means, people like myself, people like yourself.
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The God of the universe doing these extraordinary things that He does through these distinctly not extraordinary means, such as you, such as myself, such as everyone who has ever proclaimed this
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God other than Jesus Christ Himself, who obviously was extraordinary. God converted me through very mundane providences.
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My study of His word, my wife's prayers, her Christian patience, my friendship with Mike Kelly, the gospel preached to me by ordinary men.
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Many if not most of you can affirm that, that yes, just through ordinary means,
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God worked an extraordinary thing in me, through ordinary means. I'm talking about just words, I'm speaking words now, they're just words, and you're just hearing them through the physiological equipment that God gave you.
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It's all mundane, it's all ordinary, is it not? And yet God works extraordinary things by it.
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The word of God is powerful to convict, the word of God is powerful to bring us to repentance. James says that this is a word of life to you, it's able to save your soul.
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But through what? Just men speaking? Yourself reading it? God works these extraordinary things through these very mundane type things, and what
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God does with these everyday mechanisms, though, is anything but everyday, anything but mundane.
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The apostle Paul here, he makes much of what God by His Spirit has accomplished through men like himself.
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In fact, he makes so much of it that he, the apostle who makes humility the key event, or the key
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Christian trait, I should say, that apostle says that he takes pride, yes, the word is pride, in what he has done.
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So there's a caveat, and it comes in very quickly here, he doesn't wait very long to drop it on us, he takes pride of my work, what he personally did, of my work immediately for God.
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And we cannot even begin to think that he means that he, of his own will, of his own determination, did anything worth boasting of, because the very next verse gives us another of these caveats, and tells us quickly what he's speaking about, what
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Christ has accomplished through me. And with this he joins Peter, who you recall when he and John called the lame man in front of the temple to stand and walk, and everyone was amazed, and he said, men of Israel, why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us as though by our own power or piety we have made him walk?
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And immediately sheds all the glory on Christ, and he doesn't even say, look what Christ did through me, he says,
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Jesus of Nazareth did this. If you think about it, the whole book of Acts is all about what
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Christ, by his spirit, did through the apostles, men specially chosen, men specially endowed by God for this establishment of the church, yet still men with a spirit no different than ours.
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God doing these amazing, extraordinary, even miraculous things through means of non -amazing and not extraordinary people like us.
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The first five verses for us this morning, 5, 15, 17, and 21, they actually point a couple of different directions, if you just look at that as a section of scripture, it's finishing the thought of verses 14 through 16, and then it's preparing us for the rest of the chapter, verses 22 to 31.
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Verses 14 through 16, about Paul's satisfaction with the brothers, that they're able to instruct one another, admonish and counsel one another, because they're what?
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They're full of goodness, they're filled with knowledge, they're able to do these things. In this,
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Paul takes a certain amount of pride in what Christ has done that allows him to make a statement like that, that allows him to have that confidence in them.
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And this is what he means when he says, in Christ Jesus then, that word then is up to verses 14 through 16, he's taking some satisfaction, some personal satisfaction and pride, pride in the
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Savior, pride in the Spirit of God who through him worked in those people so that he could make a statement like that.
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But as we look at the text this morning, just these five verses, I mean first is verses 17 through 18, and they tell of the basis of his pride.
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And second, verse 19 is going to describe for us the power of the Spirit working through him, and finally third, verses 20 to 21, the biblical foundation for this apostolic ministry, and then his plans for its furtherance.
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Now we can make it an alliteration, it's something I don't do very often, and I didn't exactly copy him, but we do owe a lot of this to John Stott.
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Verses 17 through 18 are pride, verse 19 is power, and verse 20 to 21 is plans.
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So if you want to have a little outline for this morning, an alliteration to memorize this, to remember where we're going, that's it, the pride, the power, the plans.
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And so the pride, Paul's pride, he's not bragging here, nor is this a false humility where he points to what he's been able to do and then he gives a nod to the
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Lord. He doesn't do something like, yes, yes, well Jesus was there all the way, and see how remarkably well
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I obeyed him, and oh yes, he gets all the glory, but don't you agree that he was very wise or even clever to have chosen someone like moi for such an important task.
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There's nothing like that in what the Apostle Paul is saying here. Paul can look at what he's done with personal satisfaction and total humility.
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And we can, so early in this message here, we can stop and we can take note of that, that there is a personal satisfaction, there is a yes,
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I am glad to have taken part in this, and I am satisfied, I am personally gratified even, to see what
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God has done through myself, through me. And yet, with complete integrity, meaning it 100 % the way it sounds,
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Christ is 100 % the catalyst and the glory behind it.
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See, there's nothing wrong with being satisfied or even being proud of our work for Christ. I mean, there's a world of difference between saying with the psalmist
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David something like for by you, meaning God, for by you I can run against a troop and by my
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God I can leap over a wall. There's a difference between that and saying I'm able to run against a troop and leap over a wall, and that must be why
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God chose me. Do you see the difference? On the one hand, we're saying because of my wonderful attributes and my skills and my talents and my intellect,
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God chose me for this. On the other hand, the more proper hand is, look what
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God made me able to do, for the good of those to whom I did it, and all to his glory.
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Well, Paul is clearly with David, for by you I can run against a troop and so forth, because it's all of God.
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The immediate cause of Paul's pride is his certainty that his priestly offering of the
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Gentiles was acceptable to God, and that was verses 14 through 16. As I said, it points both ways.
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Satisfied, you're full of goodness, you're filled with knowledge, you're able to instruct, and so his pride, his boast, is in what
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Jesus Christ did through him and his personal satisfaction in seeing a church well begun and growing in holiness and growing in sanctification.
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In 2 Corinthians 11, verses 21 to 33, we're not going to read that right now, but that's where Paul writes of his labors and his sufferings for the gospel.
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And how does he get through it all? The shipwrecks and the beatings and so forth.
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Was it by his personal determination? Well, read about Paul, and remember him as Saul, Paul the apostle, remembering him as Saul the
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Pharisee, we can say accurately he was a determined man. You know,
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I can imagine if as a boy he built those models, did you ever try and build models?
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I don't even know if they still have them. I always tried to build models. He would have finished them. For me, they always turned into a glue -spotted disaster, and the decals were never quite where they were meant to be, and they always had a little bubble in them, and I always had a little glue on my finger when
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I tried to get them flat, and so they got fingerprints on them, and I just lost determination.
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I think Paul would have been, as a boy, building a model. It would have turned out to be an exact 150th replica of the ship or the plane or whatever it was he was making, and if it was a tank, the turret would turn.
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If it was a plane, the props would prop and so forth. He was a determined man.
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Did his zeal accomplish anything? I mean, we must say yes. He wrote to the Philippians of his pedigree in Jewish education and the law and how he held to it blamelessly.
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He says zealously. He was zealous for the law, for the traditions of the fathers, but of none of this do we hear a hint of boasting.
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In fact, the very resistance he had to bring any of this out tells us that he's not boasting at all.
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It was forced out of him. You'll remember false apostles, those for whom the gospel was a means of gain, those who criticized his qualifications so they could shoulder aside his inconvenient insistence on God's truth.
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When he had to defend the gospel, he set forth his sparkling resume as a
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Pharisee and as an apostle, but not to boast, not to set himself forward, not to aggrandize himself, but for the gospel's sake, when it was absolutely necessary, forced him out and only distinguished for the church what was the true gospel and the falsehoods they were hearing.
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But none of this gets any credit for anything he ever did. Christ told him, my grace is sufficient for you, for by my power, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
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And so Paul also writes, if I must boast, I will boast of things that show my weakness.
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So in this light, we take his words here in Romans 15, 17 as a complete deflection of any praise from self to Christ.
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He looks back on the results of his priestly work in the gospel. That was 14 through 16 in this chapter.
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He sees men and women trusting in Christ, eager to hear and obey his word.
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He looks at a church that needs only reminders of the truth that came to them in the gospel, and he sums it all up as a cause for what?
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For boasting in the Lord. And so we, when we do our service for Christ, when he chooses to honor that effort and bring something of eternal value through us, let us do as the apostle.
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Let's do as the apostle Paul. Take pride in our Lord who did the work, all the while being satisfied that we have taken our part.
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One of the great satisfactions you can have as a preacher is when something you say, something through ordinary means, something through an ordinary person like even myself, and I'm only speaking words, this is just English that's coming out, and yet what's behind it is the word of God, and we pray before we come out here for the power of God's spirit to imbue our words with something worthwhile.
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I recall some months ago when I was preaching the first few verses of Romans chapter 8.
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There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus and are called according to his purposes, and so forth.
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And one of the points I made there, I'm not going to re -preach the whole thing right now, but one of the points I made there is if we're running around being self -condemnatory, if you're condemning yourself, you're taking upon yourself something that belongs to Christ.
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He stood condemned in your place, and therefore you have no right to be self -condemning.
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And one of the saints here came up to me later and said, Pastor, that uncovered for me my spiritual pride, my pride in my extra humility, and how much
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I repent, and how condemnatory I am, and how much hubris I took in that.
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Well, who got the glory for that? Christ Jesus, because it's his word
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I'm proclaiming, and all I can do is do my best to make it sensible. He gets all the credit, but I do have to admit, there is a self -satisfaction.
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And it's all the glory to God is thank you, Lord, for using such as me to do any good for one of your children who you bought with your own blood.
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Self -satisfaction is different than boastful, or proud, or arrogant. It's simply, yes, that is in fact satisfying, much as the apostle
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Paul here, and much as any of us. We teach the gospel to our children, and they start to get it.
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You can give all the glory to God, which we must, because only he gets the glory, and yet be satisfied that he used you, and you can start to see some fruit from it.
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In ourselves, in our personal walk, there can be that satisfaction that, yes,
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I am growing in the way of the Lord. I can read Galatians chapter 5, and see the fruit of the
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Spirit, and see the works of the flesh, and see that I'm becoming less and less of the one, and more and more of the other.
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And without taking any credit from Jesus, and his Spirit, who's the only way this work can happen in us, there can be this satisfaction.
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Remember in the parable of the talents, you know, where the master gives one servant 10, another 5, and another 1 talent, and then he goes off on a long journey, he comes back, and he wants an accounting.
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And you remember that the one with the 10 talents gives him 10 more, and the one with the 5, 5 more. We're not going to re -preach that whole thing either.
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But I want to remind you what the master, which is of course Jesus, does not say when he receives the 10 or the 5 talents, the two who brought something back to him.
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He does not say, you lousy, unworthy servant, how dare you say
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I've gained for you 10 more talents when they were my talents that made it possible in the first place. Why didn't you say you've gained,
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I've gained you yourself more talents because you did it all, or something like that. He doesn't say that.
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What is Jesus going to say to ordinary humans, with a not so ordinary spirit in us, but to just ordinary mundane feet of clay people like you and me?
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He's going to say, well done, good and faithful servant. And who's he going to say this to?
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He's going to say that to those who believe completely what he said in John chapter 15, without me you can do nothing, can do nothing without Jesus.
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If we're not in the vine, if we're not in him, being sustained by him, receiving life from him spiritually and physically, if that be not the case, you can do nothing.
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And we know that and we believe that. Paul believed that, I'm sure. Jesus says without me you can do nothing.
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I believe the opposite is true. With me you can do much.
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As we're in Christ Jesus, not only can we do much, we're required to do much. This whole book of Romans and where we've been going lately in these last several weeks as we're closing the series up, speaking of how to edify one another and to weep together and to rejoice together and to build one another up and to admonish and encourage and counsel and rebuke and all these other things.
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We have to do something. The Christian life is doing stuff for each other.
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And Jesus says without me you can do nothing, but with me faith is a mustard seed, can tell a tree to jump into the sea or a mountain to move.
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So let us never think that we can't do anything because we're not worthy. I know
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I've been hitting this point quite a bit here in this church. We know we're not worthy. You know what
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Jesus sort of says? It's going to sound a little crass, but he says, I don't care. I know that. I know that better than you know that.
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Now get to work. I don't deserve it. I know that. I know that better than you know that. I've given you much to do.
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I can almost see him say, why do you think I had the apostles put so many imperatives, so many commands in there?
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Because I want you to do them. I want you to do them. He never says you stupid, lousy, unworthy servant.
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You're always blundering. You're always tripping. You're always falling. You're always disobeying. He doesn't say that. He just says, read the scripture, follow the commands, do it.
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Paul gives us three means here for how God worked through him. The first two are at the end of verse 18, word and deed.
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And then the third one is in the next verse in verse 19, which is the signs and wonders. So word and deed, what does that mean?
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It's very simple, mundane, everyday stuff, just what we say and do.
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With the mouth, he proclaimed the gospel. With his hands and feet, he lived it out.
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This is so everyday. This is so ordinary. When we speak for God, when you speak to your children, your friends, your family, your co -workers, when you speak and say, know the
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Lord. When the gospel of God's forgiveness by faith in his son flows from our unclean lips, we're not just conversing.
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We're speaking words of life. They're just words, right? It's just English, whatever language you're speaking in.
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It's just sounds. No, it is an ordinary, everyday thing that God has chosen to use.
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The God of the universe to use to glorify his son. Think of how people are saved.
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Romans chapter 10, verse 17. So faith, what does he mean there? He means saving faith.
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He means safe in the Lord Jesus Christ, in his sacrifice on the cross, in his death, his burial, his resurrection, his ascension, his return.
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Faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ. It's just words.
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God uses those words as those words are his words for extraordinary things, for saving souls, for giving sinners new hearts, for washing and regenerating them, and bringing them to Christ and giving them the hope of eternal life.
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Just words, or so they may seem. Here, Paul matches these two up.
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These word and deed. What we say needs to match what we do.
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Anything less is hypocrisy. And it's sort of a valid complaint when people hear one thing and they see another.
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But I have to say, it's no excuse for not believing. And we hear this all the time.
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I don't want to go to church because it's full of hypocrites. And my answer is, well, come and join us. You'll fit right in, all of us.
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And yet, when we have these excuses, we say,
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I'm not going to come to Jesus because that Jesus follower over there, I heard her say this about her husband.
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And I saw her husband go off in this direction. And then there's that one who was famous, and he hit the newspapers, and he got involved in an immoral situation, or absconded with funds.
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And therefore, I don't want to be one of them. You know, if you're one like that, if you think this way,
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I have to tell you that when you meet Jesus Christ, and you will, when you look the
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Lord in the face, because he'll be looking you in the face, you're not going to be able to answer for the bad example that I set for you, or anyone else.
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We all try to set as good an example as we can. But if that's your basis, if that's the reason you're going to use to determine your eternal destiny, you ultimately don't determine anything.
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God does it all. So you know the way I'm speaking of this. Think of what you're saying.
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It says, I would rather live condemned for all my life because of what
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I've assessed this example to be. That's not going to be the discussion you're going to have between you and Jesus.
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Jesus say, why didn't you believe the gospel? Did they tell you the gospel?
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Did they tell you about me and my death and burial and resurrection and the rest of that gospel?
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Well, yes, Lord, but they didn't match their word and deed up. You're not the one who gets to assess that for us.
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Though it will be assessed perfectly by Jesus. If your salvation, if your eternal destiny depends on my piety or anyone else's, you're never going to be saved.
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Only Christ saves, which is a miracle he usually accomplishes by means of nothing more amazing than word and deed, which he then takes and drives the truth into the heart of the hearer or the observer and grants them salvation.
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You know, in Acts chapter 16, we have an example of this. The Philippian jailer. And again, we're not going to turn there.
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But you know this story where Paul and his friends are in prison and they're chained to the wall and their feet are in stocks and there's an earthquake and all the chains fall off and they're completely free and the door flies open.
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And what are they doing? They're singing hymns. They're proclaiming God's word. Meantime, the jailer, knowing that they are now able to walk out, he sees the door open.
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He figures that they've all left. He's a dead man. He's getting ready to fall on his sword. Paul says, do yourself no harm.
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We're all here. He falls down at his feet and says, what must
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I do to be saved? What convicted him? And we know it's the spirit of God changing the heart.
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What did the spirit of God use to bring him to that point? Paul's words, the hymns he was singing, the proclamation of the gospel, the word and deed.
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In this case, the deed he didn't do. The deed of not departing.
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Word and deed matched up. We have to remember how powerful this can be. What you say is so ordinary.
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It's just English. It's just words. What we do, get up in the morning and we pray and we take a shower and we go to work.
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We take care of children. Word and deed can have incredible effect.
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And the God who saved us uses such ordinary, everyday, mundane things for purposes that we can't even imagine.
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Verse 19 is a third of these means. If there's word and deed which need to match up, the third means
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God used through Paul is the signs and wonders. What are these? These are the miracles that Christ did through the apostles.
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Peter did so many that people thought that just allowing his shadow to pass over them would bring them healing.
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Paul told a spirit to leave that girl in Philippi, which it did immediately. And there's so many, many more.
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And Paul says it was how? It was by the power of the spirit. It was a sign and a wonder.
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Well, sign is a thing that is done and the wonder is the effect that it has. Signs and wonder are extraordinary events that God uses to establish new paradigms in redemptive history.
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In Exodus 7, verse 3, God is telling Moses how he's going to bring about the freedom of Israel, how he's going to keep his word to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, this covenant.
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He's going to do it. I will multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. I speak in there directly of the 10 plagues, the gnats, the cattle disease, the hail, the river turning to blood, and so forth.
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I'm going to multiply my signs and wonders. Amongst those, though, it's not listed as one of the plagues.
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Remember too, the sovereign God in a sign and wonder, having told Moses he would do this, telling
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Moses at the outset he would do this, he had something to do with Pharaoh's heart, did he not? It's not listed as one of the plagues.
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And yet, this God in a sign and wonder saying, Moses, here's what I'm going to do with Pharaoh, the greatest king on earth at that time, and then he did it with signs and wonders.
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Israel's exodus then was this climactic event in redemptive history. In fact, the greatest event and the most often recalled event in redemptive history until what?
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The cross of Jesus Christ, the advent of Jesus Christ. And that exodus was accomplished by God's might working through no less a sinner, a man just as ordinary as the rest of us, named
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Moses. If we think of the prophets, there are two,
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Elijah and Elisha, who together are really one prophetic cycle. These two worked miracles, the dead being brought back to life, leprosy being healed, armies being vanquished, and more and more and more extraordinary events signaling an extraordinary movement of God.
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Something extraordinary, something climactic, dramatic, something new.
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Peter said in Acts chapter two, verse 22, this is great Pentecostal sermon. He said, men of Israel, hear these words.
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Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst.
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What did the signs and wonders do? They attested that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God.
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You see, the advent of our Lord was more than just a shift in God's redemptive purposes for mankind.
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It was the shift and it was attested. It was attested by God through his son by the signs and wonders that he, the son, did.
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And then Acts chapter one, verse eight will tell you, passed on to the disciples or the apostles.
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See, signs and wonders by their very nature cannot be thought of as common events.
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You know, it's a variation of the adage, if everything is one thing, then nothing is. If every day is special, then no day is special.
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If the signs and wonders of the Exodus or the Elijah -Elisha cycle or Jesus or even the apostles, if those signs and wonders are everyday or common events, then the event they attested to is not attested to.
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Or at best, it's diminished. Why is the parting of the Red Sea so profound?
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It's because it had never been done before. Because when God parted the Red Sea, it was to deliver this people who had been chased out of Egypt because of the signs and wonders of the plagues.
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It's not like we just walk up to a creek every time we don't wanna get our feet wet and it parts for us. It's a sign.
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It's a wonder. It's signaling something. Something huge.
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Something dramatic. Something new. Joel prophesied about Christ coming and the sending of the
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Spirit this way. He said, I will show wonders in the heaven and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke.
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If they had seen blood and fire and columns of smoke the day before and the weather channel said it might come again next week, then we'd have to ask, where's the wonder?
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What's being signified by this everyday event which on Channel 5 KPIX weather, they said we can expect again.
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Pretty soon. You see my point. Signs and wonders.
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John chapter nine, the man who Jesus healed. Do you remember what he said when he was brought before the Sanhedrin?
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He said, why, this is an amazing thing. You do not know where he comes from speaking of Jesus and yet he opened my eyes.
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Excuse me. We know that God does not listen to sinners but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will,
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God listens to him. Never since the world began, mark those words, never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind which of course
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Jesus had just done. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.
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If eyes were opened every day, where's the wonder? If you or I could anoint blind eyes and make them see, then how would that miracle attest to Christ and hear this, attest to Christ and him alone?
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John the Baptist asked whether Jesus was the one. He said to his disciples, are you the one we expected or should we wait for another?
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And how did Jesus answer him? He says, go and tell John what you hear and see.
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The blind receive their sight and the lame walk. Lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear and the dead are raised up and the poor have good news preached them and blessed is the one who is not offended by me.
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Now listen, if John could have heard that and answered something, well, that's all pretty amazing but you know, just yesterday,
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I healed a man of leprosy and brother Mordecai over him, you know him, he just last week touched a lame leg and the guy jumped up and danced a jig.
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And it was, who was that? I can't remember who it was because it happened so often that that guy came up out of the grave.
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I don't remember who prayed for him but pop. No, that's not it at all.
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These are signs and wonders. They signify something. In this case, signify that Jesus Christ and in him the kingdom of God, the advent of the
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Messiah had come and that God was doing this new and remarkable work and that's why
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Jesus points, he doesn't say the blind received their sight like it happened last month or remember this other guy who could do it.
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No, it's all about him. The signs, a new work of God, an advancement in the revelation of his son
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Jesus. Signs and wonders open the door of hearts to see and wonder and believe the gospel.
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When Israel saw the smoke and the fire and the thundering on Sinai, you know, they didn't yawn. They feared, they worshiped, they believed.
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We speak about it so often, we sing about it. We need to stop and think about this for a moment. Here you are camped out and there's that mountain and the top of it just shrouded in lightning and thunder and fire and after 40 days and 40 nights still alive, here comes
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Moses. It's not an everyday occurrence. It meant something.
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You know, pride is proper when pride is in Christ. When we look at with proud exclamation at what
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Jesus Christ has done. We take ourselves out of the equation. It's a screaming silence that puts, that ends up putting the attention on myself.
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In other words, if we don't, if we pretend as if I had nothing at all to do with it, it's a way actually of putting more attention on the self.
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We can be honest, we can be realistic about what God has done through us when we remember that any good we do is possible only by the power of his spirit, which of course
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Ephesians chapter one verse 19 says is being worked toward us who believe. Signs and wonders.
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Signs and wonders then to attest to the apostles who are attesting to Christ, who was attested by those signs and wonders also, and they carry on in that line, but they're not something that happens every day.
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You don't find them on page one and then page three and then page five of the front page as they get less and less amazing because we've seen it so often.
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Signs and wonders signifying this new work of God. This new advancement in redemptive history.
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This new revelation of his work in his son Jesus. Verses 20 to 21 then,
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Paul tells of his plan or his plans, where he wants to go, what he's going to do next. In verse 23, he'll tell of his plan to go to Spain, but here in verse 20, it's simply his plan to preach the gospel where it hasn't already been preached.
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Verse 21, the quote from Isaiah chapter 52, 15 gives us his biblical mandate for this.
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Those who have never been told of him will see and those who have never heard will understand.
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And so on that basis, he makes it his ambition to preach the gospel where Christ has not been named.
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He doesn't want to build on someone else's foundation. I don't want to say here that preaching where someone else has already been labored is not wrong.
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That what Paul is saying here is not something that's supposed to be normative for every ministry that anybody ever does.
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He's saying here, this is his ambition. This is what he wants to do.
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He wants to go to new ground. Some of the great church fathers like Chrysostom say that he wanted to go there before the false apostles got there and made things so confused that Paul would have to then correct things before he could get the gospel to be made clear.
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It's an interesting idea. Paul simply says here that he wants to go where no one else has gone before.
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Sort of like that Star Trek theme in the original series where no man has gone before. But he's not saying here that if you go where other people have gone, you're not doing good ministry or you're somehow wrong or sinful.
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This is what he did. You know, if that were the case, that you couldn't go where another man had been, then
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I oughtn't be here at all building on what Pastor George did before me or Pastor Downing did before him.
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Paul's charter and therefore the basis of his plans was to break new ground in fresh territory and not everyone's called to do that.
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Not everyone is equipped for that. That's what Paul did. We do ourselves no service if we ever try to make that normative.
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Anyone, actually, anyone who labors in the gospel, I mean all of us, not just full -time workers, all of us, if we labor in the gospel, we are building on a foundation that we didn't lay.
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Ephesians 2 .20, we're building on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles.
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So we have to stand on someone else's work. It's not something we did, it is
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Christ who is building his church. So of necessity, we build on someone else's labors.
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Paul's charter to go to places where the gospel hadn't been heard is appropriate for some today, but it's not mandated.
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His use of chapter 52 and verse 15 of Isaiah sort of wraps it all up.
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If they in Rome were wondering why he did things the way he did or why he was willing to accept so many delays in coming to them in Rome, it's right here.
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Those who have never been told will see and those who have never heard will understand.
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Now that's Isaiah 52 .15, as I said, that's the beginning of the fourth and last of what we call the servant songs in the prophet
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Isaiah. It speaks of the effect that God's servant, that's
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Jesus, that he's going to have on nations that had previously been ignorant of him. Paul's not suggesting that he is that servant because that would border on blasphemy.
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That servant is Christ. Rather, what he's saying is he stands in that path of redemptive history where God uses ordinary people to complete his commission to his son,
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Jesus. The effect Jesus has on people comes about by people.
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It is not the people themselves. It is him, it is God by his spirit choosing to work by means of them.
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I think the days of signs and wonders of the type that Paul speaks of in Romans 15, that the apostles did in establishing the church and that God did so many years ago in delivering
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Israel. I think those days are over. That's my personal opinion. We can support that from the
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Bible. I don't want to turn this into a lecture on that. I think those are over. I think they're over largely because of the dramatic significance that they're supposed to have and the new work that they're supposed to indicate.
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They signify something, not just an everyday occurrence. By Jesus' hand and then by the apostles, the gospel, the truth of this apostolic word has been attested.
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Most importantly, the death, the burial, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, that if you should repent of your sins, that because of Christ's life, his perfect life before God, because of his death on the cross wherein he suffered
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God's wrath for your sin and his resurrection, which confirmed all the promises of God to be yes and amen in him, that if you should believe in him, if you should repent of your sin and come to him and him alone for salvation.
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All this attested by the previous signs and wonders which prove that this gospel that the apostles preached, wrote down in this word, in this gospel that I'm trying to make clear this day, will save you.
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It has been attested by those signs and wonders. It has been attested by the death, the burial and resurrection, the greatest sign, the greatest wonder of them all.
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But if I'm saying that the days of those kinds of signs and wonders are over, their passing does not leave us bereft of any resources.
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The spirit is with us. He's with us individually. He's with us as a body. Any time we do anything of any value for the kingdom, it is proof that he's working through us differently than he did through Paul and the other apostles, but no less the spirit of God working extraordinary things like faith, like repentance, like obedience, like growth and sanctification, like desiring to be like Jesus.
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Things like that. The love and the unity of the brethren is a sign of the spirit working amongst us.
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That same spirit who worked those miracles through Paul is working strides in holiness in us, strides in sanctification, advancement into the image of Christ.
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And he's doing that through means no less ordinary than myself standing here preaching the gospel as well as I can make it sensible to you, yourselves as you testify to each other, as you encourage one another in all these things.
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And I tell you, dear ones, that's enough. Jesus said at the end of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, if they do not hear
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Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced that someone should rise from the dead. It's not the sign or the wonder, but it's
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God changing hearts and bringing eternal good through the working of his spirit. And if he chooses now to work through something so mundane, so ordinary as spoken language and observable deeds to work eternal good in someone, brethren, that's enough.
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And the spirit of God doing that through you is no different. He is the same spirit of the same
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God who worked the miracles and the signs and the wonders through Paul and Peter and John and the rest and through Moses so many centuries before even that.
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And that's enough. And God does something through you or me, something like that through means such as ourself is something that we can, like Paul, take pride in.
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Pride in a Savior like Jesus. Pride in a Savior like Jesus, the one who John said,
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John the Baptist, and here's our motif, here's our charter, if you will, I must become less and he must become greater.
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We can take pride in a Savior like Jesus who becomes greater and greater because he humbled himself to become like us.
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He secured our salvation dying on the cross and who from heaven he continues through us to do this glorious work.
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Amen. Gracious heavenly Father, we again thank you for the day that you've given us, for the time that we have together.
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And Father, just for your word and for your spirit and for the strength that you give us, and for the incredible fact that you do choose to work extraordinary things by your spirit through ordinary means such as men and women like ourselves, through what we say, what we do, as we hold faithfully to your word and do all things to please our
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Savior Jesus Christ and bring glory to your name. And we thank you for all this in Christ's name. Amen.