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All throughout Paul's letter to the Roman Christians, he has been pouring forth this doctrine of justification. But it's not just enough that we hear right doctrine and understand it. We also need to put it into right practice when we understand the text.
You are listening to When We Understand the Text, an online Bible ministry so that we may know all the riches freely given to us by God. For questions and comments, send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.
Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.
Thank you, Becky. We are in Romans chapter 16, verses 17 through 23. That's the section that we're going to be looking at this week. Then next week, we're going to do the doxology, those last three verses in Romans, 25, 26, and 27.
We're also going to do some highlighting. We went through the first 11 chapters of Romans and highlighted key passages. We're going to do that again with chapters 12 through 16, which will probably be Wednesday of next week.
Then that'll be it. We'll be done with the book of Romans. What I'm going to do after that is I'll take a week off. That'll be August 29th through September 2nd. We'll be back on the program again on September 5th, which is Labor Day.
We'll begin a study of the book of 1 Corinthians. The program is also going to sound a little bit different, but there's still going to be the same commitment to Bible teaching that I've always had, about 20 minutes a day.
Still going to keep the format that we've been doing with New Testament study. 1 Corinthians will be our study on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, an Old Testament book study on Thursday, and then doing our Q &A on Friday.
Thank you so much for your continued commitment to listening to this program. It matters to us that you listen. If we didn't have the listeners, I wouldn't be doing this. I appreciate the listenership that we have received.
If you would be so kind as to share with us what this program has meant to you, we would love to hear from you. Our email address is whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com. I wouldn't be offended if you emailed me personally.
Sometimes folks find my personal email address because they read my blog, and that's where my address is listed there. You can email me that way as well, pastorgabehughes at gmail .com. I'll take emails both ways.
All right, let's go to our text here, Romans 16, beginning in verse 17. Paul says,. And by smooth talk and flattery they deceive the hearts of the naive. For your obedience is known to all, so that I rejoice over you.
But I want you to be wise as to what is good, and innocent as to what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Timothy, my fellow worker, greets you.
So do Lucius and Jason and Saucipater, my kinsman. I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord. Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother Quartus greet you.
Let's go back to verse 17 here. Paul makes an impassioned appeal to the church in Rome that they would be wise about the motives of false teachers and avoid them. I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught.
This whole doctrine that we have been reading in this whole book of Romans, which is now being brought to a close. So concerning this doctrine that you have been taught, Paul is saying what I have taught you is true.
It is right. It is pure. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Watch out for those who teach contrary to what you have just heard read to you in this letter. Avoid such false teachers. In every single one of Paul's letters, he addresses false teaching.
He warns the church about false teachers. And every one of them except one. And that would be Paul's letter to Philemon. He had a specific purpose in writing to Philemon, that Philemon would receive Onesimus as a brother in Christ, not as a bondservant or a slave.
So there was no need in that letter for Paul to warn Philemon about false teaching. But in every other letter that Paul wrote, and not just Paul's letters, but every other book of the New Testament, we have clear warnings against false teaching.
Jesus warned against false teachers. In fact, he said some false teachers would come and try to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand. That was in the Olivet Discourse, Matthew 24, where he talked about that.
And even in John's Revelation, in the book of Revelation, those first few chapters, as Jesus is talking to John and addressing the churches in Asia Minor, he is warning those churches about false teaching.
We see it all the way through the New Testament. And here is the part where Paul makes his warning, his appeal, to these Roman Christians in Rome, that they would avoid such false teachers. Watch out for those who cause division.
False teaching will always divide. It never unifies. And division that happens in the body of Christ is always, in some way, form or another, the result of false teaching. Even if you have two brothers that are in disagreement with one another, though their doctrines and their beliefs might be sound, when those two brothers divide, what has happened is the practice of that sound doctrine has gone askew somewhere, and it's what's caused this division.
So you take cage-stage Calvinism, for example. So you have a young Calvinist who loves the doctrines of grace, but they're not very gracious. That's why they get called cage-stage, because they've come into this new doctrine that they think everybody needs to know, and if they can't exegete Romans 9 correctly, then they're not even a true believer.
And so they get referred to as cage-stage Calvinists because they need to be locked in a cage for a while until they can learn grace, learn how to be forgiving and gracious to the members of the body of Christ.
You can take good doctrine and be divisive with it, and then it becomes false teaching. Even though the doctrine is solid, it's the practice of it that becomes that false reflection of what the doctrine does not teach.
There's a difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Orthodoxy is right teaching. Orthopraxy is the practice of that teaching, and it is necessary to have both. It's great to have orthodoxy, but you can have a textbook that's orthodox.
You can have a textbook that's sitting there on your desk with good teaching inside it, but it's not doing anything. Until you open it and read it and understand what is being taught there and then put those teachings into practice, does that teaching become meaningful?
So even when we take solid teaching, we can use it in a—or misuse it, rather— in an improper way that it becomes false in practice. And so division is caused even in this way when sound teaching is applied in a false way.
So wherever we see division, there is false teaching, and wherever there is false teaching, there will always be a divide. It never unifies. It never unifies. It always divides. Paul had said through Titus that before we came to Christ, before we understood the grace and mercy of God that saved us not by any action of our own, but because God is merciful, we were hated by others, and we were hating one another.
That's one of the marks of a lost sinner, that there's just this constant division between sinners. Though you might see people unified in sin, like you see a gay pride parade, for example, there's a bunch of people who are unified in their sin, right?
But there's no real unity happening there. Each person that is involved in some sort of event like that is there for their own intents and purposes, not because they're being charitable toward anyone else.
So there's still this division of heart that exists between two lost sinners who are seeking their own good for their own glory and no one else. So when we were lost in our sin, we were hated by others, and we were hating one another.
But then as it says in Titus 3, 4, when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life, fellow heirs.
And that is the body of Christ together, not as individual persons. Paul stated previously in Titus 2, 14 that Christ gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works.
So before we came to Christ, we were hated by others, and we were hating one another. But Christ purified us and made us His people. So we're no longer in this for ourselves. It's to the glory of God and working together with the saints.
We are zealous for good works. And so if we understand the teaching of God rightly, then we will exercise that right teaching in orthopraxy, the right practice that we talked about there. So here you have Paul warning the church to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles that is contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught.
And understand when Paul is saying doctrine, he's meaning not just the letter that he has written and you've heard it and you believe it, but you're also practicing it because that's what chapters 12 through 16 have been all about.
Chapters 1 through 11 were the doctrine as he laid it out, and then chapters 12 through 16 was what that doctrine is supposed to look like in practice in the life of a believer. So when Paul is saying doctrine here, he's not just talking about words on a page.
He's talking about the way that is even exercised in the heart of a believer. Watch out for those who cause divisions, even those who might speak the right words, but they divide with those words. They create obstacles that prevent the grace and love and mercy of God from being exercised in the body of Christ.
And I have experienced this as a pastor before. I have had men in my church that were very sound in their teaching. You give them a top-level theology school exam and you set them down at a table and you expect them to fill that out, they would probably ace that test.
But when it came to the practice of that right doctrine, they fell far short of orthopraxy. Great in orthodoxy, but very poor in orthopraxy. So it's very important as we have talked about these things and we've committed over the course of 2016 so far, ever since January, to reading through the book of Romans that we not just have a right understanding of doctrine in terms of textbook definitions, but that we are also able to put these things into practice and show in display the grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Those who cause divisions, those who create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you have been taught, do not serve the Lord Christ, but their own appetites. Do you understand that a person's doctrine can even be right?
Again, as far as words on a page, but yet the way that they apply that doctrine to themselves is just to feed their own appetite and not the Lord Christ? By smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive.
Now, it's very easy for us to look at that and think to ourselves, well, yeah, that's the prosperity gospel. That's the Joel Esteens and the Joyce Myers and the T .D. Jakeses of the world. But sometimes the false teachers are not going to be that obvious.
Sometimes those who cause divisions and create obstacles, sometimes they're not going to be as clearly conflicting against the gospel of Christ as a false teacher like Joel Esteen. To some, it's going to take a little bit more discernment to know whether or not a person truly has the right and sound doctrine and also knows how to put those things into practice.
But all of us need training. All of us need to learn how, let me put it this way, all of us need to learn doctrine and then all of us need to learn how to apply that doctrine to our lives. And that is done in the church.
It's done by the teaching of a solid church that is committed to sound doctrine and is centered around the gospel of Jesus Christ. All the doctrine that is taught by that church flows from the gospel of Christ.
It is people within that church willing to mentor one another, not just in understanding spiritual truths but putting those things into practice as well. This is how we learn how to be Christians in this world.
We do this together as the church, as the body of Christ. When we're set apart on our own, when we're by ourselves, we can pick and choose the passages of scripture that we like and we can exercise those things in a very ungracious way.
Even if we have a right understanding of the text and we understand it in context, we can still do that in an improper way if we're not willing to be properly trained by the elders to whom we should submit in the church and our brothers and sisters in Christ who hold us accountable, who encourage and admonish us.
So let us be faithful to the church, this people of God that we have been reconciled to through Jesus Christ, our Lord, a people who are zealous for good works and put into practice the right teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We're going to talk about this a little bit more tomorrow and examine some more specifics. Also go to some different passages of scripture where Paul issues other warnings about false teachers and also James and Peter who do very similar things here.
Jude also. Boy, that's a letter that's just outright dedicated to calling out false teachers. He starts by saying, I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, but I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints because Jude has heard about false teaching that has arisen in the church.
Even within that first generation, those first 40 years of the church, how dangerous it was that false teaching had come about and attempted to sway the saints. And so it is very important for us as a church to be aware of these things and to understand right teaching.
If we are really familiar with the real, then we'll know when something fake comes across our table. We'll be able to look at it and go, I know that's not what lines up with the word of God, but we must be committed to the scriptures first to know the difference between what is true and what is false.
Our great God, as we wrap up this teaching today, I pray that you would give us a spirit of discernment. And if we are weak in discernment, that we would trust those within the body of Christ to whom that gift has been given, that we might be aware of false teachers and their methods and their motives, and we would hold fast to the true words of Christ and remain steadfast in this to the end by your mercy and your grace, oh God.
We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen. Gabriel Hughes is the pastor.
Of First Southern Baptist Church in Junction City, Kansas. Find out more online at www .tt .com.