Accepting All
Romans 15:7-13
We are in
Romans, chapter 15. This is the last section in Romans 15, ends and concludes
the section that we began several weeks ago on the weaker brother in Romans 14.
It also concludes the section in Romans that began with Romans 12:1-2 so it
might behoove us a little bit to go back and look at the introduction so that
when we get to Romans 15:15, we'll be starting the conclusion to the epistle.
Romans 1:1-17
is the introduction. Romans 1:18 to Romans 15:13 is the main body of the
epistle. The concluding section began in verse 1 of chapter 12 where Paul
challenges them. This is an exhortation, which is a personal challenge to
obedience in a number of areas. He begins in Romans 12:1 by saying, "I
beseech you, therefore, brethren by the mercies of God that you present your
bodies a living sacrifice…" I noted at the time that your whole life is to
a sacrifice to the purpose and the plan of God for your life. This is something
that we all grow into as we mature as believers. It's supposed to be a living
sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our reasonable or rational
service.
What this means
is that we're not to be conformed to the world [verse 2] but transformed by the
renewing of our mind. Mind first, then action. Mind before emotion; mind before
action. We don't just change what we do. We need to change the way we think.
One distinction between Christianity and all world religions is that
Christianity focuses on an internal change first.
In the New
Testament it focuses on an internal change that is empowered by God the Holy
Spirit. This is something that has never before happened in human history, and
that is that every single believer has God the Holy Spirit indwelling them and
filling them so they can walk by means to the Spirit throughout their life. It
is God the Holy Spirit who is the energizing, empowerment for the church age
believer.
Then this comes
as He renovates our thinking, overhauls our thinking according to the Word of
God for a purpose "that we may prove something." Our lives are to
demonstrate something. It's like an experiment. You go into the chemistry lab
and you perform an experiment and one purpose of that is to demonstrate a known
truth. So we are to demonstrate in our lives the reality and the value of
living according to the will of God. So that is our purpose to prove that the
will of God is "good and acceptable and perfect."
Now as we look
through this section, there's an emphasis of this whole aspect of the life of
the believer within the body of Christ and how we are to serve one another.
This comes under the primary command of loving one another. That is repeated
several times in chapter 12. Then it's applied in chapter 13 in relation to
government. Then it is applied again in terms of dealing with the weaker
brother.
So chapter 14
began with the command to "receive one who is weak." This is actually
the immature believer who is weak in the faith. We're not to get involved in disputes
over debatable or insignificant or unimportant issues, which are things that
are not directly addressed in Scripture. We may think and come to certain
convictions on our own that some behavior or some activities do not conform to
the will of God. That's our opinion because it's not specifically stated in the
Word of God. So the issue here is that there are those believers who are
imposing their convictions on other believers.
The command
that Paul gave there was for the more mature believer was to accept into
fellowship those who were immature or weak in the faith and who might hold to
other convictions that were not important or part of revelation. The more
mature believers were to accept them and have this unity. In the conclusion of
this section Paul goes back to this same idea. In Romans 15:7-13 he says,
"Therefore receive one another just as Christ also received us to the
glory of God. Now I say that Jesus Christ has become a servant to the
circumcision for the truth of God to confirm the promises made to the fathers.
And that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy as it is written, 'For
this reason I will confess to you among the Gentiles and sing to Your name.'
And again he says, 'Rejoice O Gentiles with His people.' And again, 'Praise the
Lord all you Gentiles. Laud Him all you peoples.' And again Isaiah says, 'There
shall be a root of Jesse and He who shall rise to reign over the Gentiles, in
Him the Gentiles shall hope.' Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and
peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy
Spirit."
See this ends
with this benediction in verse 13 focusing on the fact we cannot do this on our
own. The church age is not based on a principle of simple morality. Anyone can
be moral. There are many pagan religions that emphasize morality. There are
Christian cults that emphasize morality. There are religions like Islam that
has a law that purportedly emphasizes morality. Judaism emphasizes the Law of
Moses as a standard of morality.
But that's not
spirituality according to the New Testament. Spirituality is based upon our
walk by means of the Holy Spirit. Spirituality is based on grace and not based
on works. So we start this final section [verse 7] with Paul starting off with
the particle dIo, which draws a conclusion from that which has gone
before. He says, "Therefore receive one another…" He uses the word
"receive" here twice. He says we are to receive one another first and
the pattern for that, the basis for that, is Jesus Christ. "Just as or in
the same way as Christ also received us to the glory of God." So we are to
receive one another the same way Christ receives us.
Now when we
look at this word receive it takes us right back to Romans 14:1 which say,
"Receive one who is weak in the faith…" That's the same word, same
command. In Romans 14:1 down through 15:6 the focus was on the mature believer
accepting and receiving into fellowship the immature believer. Now Paul expands
that. He steps it up a notch and he says we are all to receive one another. In
context he's not just talking about you and me. He's not just talking about the
mature believer and the younger believer. When he develops this, starting in
verses 8 and 9, he's talking about Jew and Gentile.
Again, this
reinforces the idea that the issue at stake in Romans 14 is that the weaker
brother was referring to those from a Jewish background who were still
following the Mosaic Law. Not necessarily as a way of spirituality because if
they thought it was a way of spirituality, Paul would say they were wrong.
That's what he did in Galatians. He said they were wrong, that the Mosaic Law
is not a way of spirituality. It's not a way of salvation. He made that
exceptionally clear in some very strong language in Galatians.
Here he's
talking about the weaker brother as the person who was worried about eating
food that was clean, concerned about observing certain days. If his motivation
was that made them more spiritual, Paul would have said they were wrong.
They're following those because they think it is still significant and
important because this was what was drilled into their background when they
were children. This is their comfort zone within their orthodox Jewish
background. They still believe it's important to observe the dietary laws but
not for spiritual reason but for other reasons. If they were spiritual reasons
Paul would have come down on them hard. They're still thinking this is right
for other reasons and they're trying to impose that on others.
Paul moves from
this problem that is apparently occurring between Jewish and Gentile Christians
in the Roman church and he's coming to this conclusion that they are to receive
one another. We could paraphrase this verse as, "Therefore receive one
another into Christian fellowship." The verb PROSLAMBANO has that idea of accepting someone into fellowship,
into your social environment, making them part of coming to church with you and
be very accepting of one another. So we are to accept them just as Christ also
received us into permanent fellowship.
Fellowship is
used a couple of times in the New Testament in terms of our permanent union
with Christ. That is a permanent fellowship. Most of the times we use the term
fellowship in terms of relative fellowship describing our rapport with God. The
word is actually used both ways in the Scripture but primarily in 1 John, it is
used of that on-going rapport where John talks about the fact that we are to
have fellowship with one another for our fellowship is with God. So there's
both a horizontal fellowship with one another and a vertical fellowship with
God. That vertical fellowship with God is the basis for our horizontal
fellowship with one another.
It's
interesting that in John that the primary basis for breaking fellowship in 1
John isn't that you've committed a personal sin. Most of us think that's the
primary way that we break fellowship with God. I love it when I can say
something and watch those of you who've been around for a long time and your
face just sort of screws up and you're asking, "What in the world is he
talking about?" In 1 John, John is more concerned about doctrine. If you
hold a wrong doctrine you're out of fellowship. His primary thing isn't
relationship.
Americans
emphasize relationship over other things more than other cultures have. That's
just your cultural background showing through. In 1 John, John is really
concerned first and foremost about right doctrine. It's not that he's not
talking about the other. That's clearly there. Wrong doctrine means you're out
of fellowship. We rarely hear that emphasized. If you have a heretical view of
the person and work of Jesus Christ or a heretical view of God or what Christ
did on the cross in terms of substitutionary atonement then you are out of
fellowship. As long as you maintain those heretical views you're out of
fellowship with God because right fellowship is based on right doctrine. It's
also based on walking by the Spirit. But if we're holding the wrong doctrine,
consciously believing heretical doctrine, then that excludes that of
fellowship.
So Paul says
we're to receive one another in Christian fellowship, just as Christ also
received us into permanent fellowship. Now Christ accepting us into permanent
fellowship is based on our faith in Christ. At the instant we trust in Him God
imputes to us perfect righteousness. When we have His perfect righteousness
then God looks at us, not on the basis of who we are or what we've done, not at
all the petty little sins we've committed but He looks at the perfect righteousness
of Christ. That perfect righteousness of Christ covers all the nasty little
sins in our lives and the fact that we're born spiritually dead and God the
Father declares us to be just. It's not because of anything we've done but it's
because we possess the righteousness of Christ. At that instant we're accepted
into the perfect fellowship with the Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and
God the Holy Spirit.
Now ask a
question here. When this happens upon whose character is this based? When
Christ receives us into permanent fellowship upon whose character is that
based? It's based on the character of God. It's not based on anything related
to us. It's based on Christ's fellowship and the character of God. Therefore
when Paul makes this statement that we're to accept one another into fellowship
in the body of Christ, that's not based on the character of the people we're
accepting into fellowship. It's not based on what they've done. It's not based
on what they haven't done. It's not based on their failures in life. It's based
on the fact that we need to accept them because they are already accepted by
God. If God says they're righteous and they're accepted, who are we to say,
"Well you have to clean up a bunch of stuff before I can accept you?"
Someone else
can look at our lives and could say, "You've got all these failures so I'm
not going to accept you." I think there's a difference between accepting
someone into Christian fellowship and accepting someone as your BFF (Your best
friend forever). I thought I'd just throw that off in case you weren't paying
attention. Someone you want to accept as your friend has to meet other
criterion as well. I'm talking about a person who is more intimate with you
than someone else.
All of us have circles
of intimacy. We have those people we spend a lot of time with and we get to
know well. We are much freer with them and we share things, private things that
we may not share with other people. That's part of discrimination in the good
sense. We all have different degrees of intimacy with people. No one can be
intimate with everyone at the same level. I don't even think it's wise to try
to be intimate with everyone at the same level because not everyone is
necessarily trustworthy in that sense so we have different degrees of closeness
and intimacy with different people.
In terms of
accepting someone in the body of Christ then we're not to exclude them on the
basis of certain sins or certain kinds of behavior. Christ has accepted them so
they are acceptable. Now this may apply to some of you and not to others. I've
observed people who come from rather large families, whether they have 4, 5, or
6 siblings plus their parents and aunts and uncles and lots of people. But even
among families in relatively good harmony there's not the same degree of
intimacy between siblings. I know some families where one or two of the
siblings may be incredibly close and they're not so close to maybe one or two
of the other siblings but they all have a family devotion and loyalty to one
another. That's sort of the pattern we should see in the body of Christ.
I'm a little
bit hesitant to use as analogies good patterns of human families because the
family is such a wreck in the United States. A lot of people have never really
experienced a healthy family with two parents and siblings and anything close
to stability. They're born into a family with no father or mother or the
parents are irresponsible and the fallenness of this world has just impacted
their ability to understand family analogies that we have in Scripture.
Nevertheless the Bible uses these kinds of analogies. So we're to accept one
another into this permanent fellowship.
We know that
prior to salvation none of us were very lovely. We were all rather obnoxious. We
go back just a few chapters in Romans and we're described as ungodly, sinners,
and enemies. Christ died for us. He didn't die for you because you were such a
wonderful person. You were so bright and brilliant and had such good ideas,
were so successful. He didn't die for you because He knew you would end up
being a really good Christian. He died for you as an obnoxious sinner in
violation of God's righteousness. This reminds us when we're dealing with other
people we have to deal with them in grace.
Grace is the
foundation for love. If you don't understand grace you don't love someone. I'm
somewhat surprised in some marriages that they manage to survive because
neither person understands a thing about grace. Then they don't understand a
lot of other things too and they don't know how to communicate with each other.
Somehow they just have a partnership that manages to work but it has nothing to
do with the kind of marriage that Scripture talks about where there's a level
of intimacy and fellowship that goes beyond just traveling down the same road
together in the same general direction.
Sadly, a lot of
marriages are like two people in separate cars speeding down I-10 parallel to
each other headed for San Antonio but there's not a lot of interaction between
the two. There's not a lot of interaction between them because they're in two
separate vehicles isolated from each other. What Scripture portrays is two
people who are going to some destination together. They're both in the same
car. So we are to be working together and that's the application of fellowship
toward one another. The pattern is Christ.
This concept of
grace toward one another is something that has played a very large role in this
last part of Romans. We've all studied the many, many passages in the New
Testament that talk about our responsibilities to one another. We're to teach
one another. We're to admonish one another. We're to serve one another. All of
these are part of what it means to be in the body of Christ. In the immediate
context of Romans 12–15 we see this. In Romans 12:5 at the very beginning
of this section Paul says, "So we being many are one body in Christ."
I pointed this out several times.
This is
somewhat difficult for a lot of American Christians to understand because we
have such an emphasis on individualism, rugged individualism. Everyone does
their own thing as opposed to being part of a team. If you have a background in
team sports or you were in the military environment where you worked as a team,
you'll have a better perception of these things. The Scripture says we are
members of one another. We're not just living our spiritual life in isolation
and autonomy.
While we
recognize the importance of privacy and recognizing other people's privacy you
can push privacy to the point where there's no one another. The Bible really
emphasizes that we are to be a part of one another's life. That's our
ontological spiritual reality. There's a good word for you. This is who we are
in Christ. We are members, co-dependent, and we have this inter-dependency
within the body of Christ. We are members of one another.
Because of that
in Romans 12:10 Paul says, "Be kindly affectionate to one another with
brotherly love." This isn't just loving one another in a sense of saying
"I don't really know you very well but I'm just going to be kind and
polite to you and as gracious to you as I possibly can even though I don't
really know you." That a sense of impersonal love which we've talked
about. This is talking about more of a personal dimension to that love for one
another. "In honor, giving preference to one another."
The foundation
for that in Scripture is that whoever we are with as a human being is worthy of
honor and respect, not because of who they are or what they do but because they
are created in the image and likeness of God. That's the foundation for the
whole doctrine for the value of human life. It doesn't matter how despicable,
obnoxious, dirty they are. It doesn't matter how ignorant, wrongheaded or
clouded by religious activism or activities a person is, we are to honor their
life because they are created in the image or likeness of God.
It doesn't
matter what kind of a religious extremist they are. Even if they're a member of
ISIS, if they're
attacking the United States, we need to kill them as quickly and efficiently as
possible to the glory of God and out of love. That's how you deal with loving
your enemy in some contexts. But in other contexts where there's not a combat
situation we need to deal with people like that out of love and respect because
is how the Lord Jesus Christ did.
It's really
interesting when we go through Matthew on Sunday mornings to watch how the Lord
deals with the Pharisees because they're an obnoxious, wrong-headed group.
Jesus deals with them very sternly and politely. He doesn't back down. He
doesn't let them set the agenda but he doesn't lose control. He's not
impatient. He's not insulting to them personally. He identifies them as a group
as a brood of vipers, which is an idiom for the spawn of serpents. That takes
it right back to the Garden of Eden. He's honest but he's not being personally
insulting or personally hostile in that sense.
He's being
accurate and describing the truth. That is described as speaking the truth in
love but it's got to be done without a self-absorbed basis for the rest of us.
Jesus did it. He didn't have a sin nature. I have trouble with that because my
sin nature gets in the way. Romans 12:16 says we are to be of the same mind
toward one another. That means we're to exercise humility and grace orientation
towards one another.
Romans 13:8
says, "Owe no one anything except to love one another." We looked at
that idiom for owing no one anything and we saw that's not a financial term.
It's not talking about financial debt. Sin in rabbinical thought was a debt
against God. That's basically saying not to sin against each other, just love
one another. That's the focal point for "He who loves has fulfilled the
Law."
We come to our
passage in Romans 15:7 where Paul says, "Wherefore, receive one another
just as Christ received us." As we think about having the same mind toward
one another and loving one another, this really takes us back to the previous
two verses, which I covered rather briefly at the end of the lesson. This is a
benediction at the end of the section in Romans 14:1 through 15:5 where Paul is
pronouncing a blessing, "Now may the God of patience and comfort…"
Both of these are emphasized because when you're dealing with someone who is an
immature believer just as when you're dealing with an immature child who is out
of line you need patience and the ability to encourage them. That's the word
comfort there. "May the God of patience and comfort [encouragement] grant
you to be like-minded toward one another."
This doesn't
mean we're going to agree on these debatable areas but we're going to agree to
disagree and not make issues out of non-essentials and focus just on the
essentials that are a part of Scripture. It's hard enough just to focus on just
the essentials that are a part of Scripture and what God has specifically told
us to do and not to do without introducing a lot of secondary issues into those
commands that aren't really part of Scripture.
Paul says,
"Also may the God of patience and of comfort grant you to be like-minded
toward one another." This is the real basis of unity. Unity is grounded in
our relationship to God. There's a lot of talk about unity in Christianity that
is completely fraudulent. People look out and say, "Well, there are so
many denominations." There's a reason why there are so many denominations.
It's not necessarily a good reason. In some cases it is. The reason you have a
lot of denominations in Christianity is because of people who are self-absorbed
and have let their thinking dominate their minds in terms of doctrinal things
or the way in which they've handled their authority in a local church.
For roughly
1500 years or a little less there was only one denomination, basically. There
were all kinds of problems within that denomination. There were groups and
subgroups and all kinds of sects in what became known as Roman Catholicism.
There was a lot of division. In fact, if you can break down within Roman
Catholicism from roughly 600 to 1500 and you can identify almost as many different
subsets of Roman Catholics as you later developed among Protestants. It's just
that they didn't all separate out into autonomous groups. That had to do with
how the church was united with the state. Once you separated out it was viewed
by the political leaders as an act of treason as well as a religious act.
When Martin
Luther led the Protestant reformation in 1517 it was at a time when political
leaders were flexing their muscles and breaking out from the domination by the
Roman Catholic Church. So it was the right time for these kinds of splits to
take place. When Luther started by nailing his 95 theses onto the church in
Wittenberg he was not intending to leave the Roman Catholic Church. His intent
was to reform the Roman Catholic Church. He wanted to have a debate about it
but the powers that be said they didn't want to talk about it. They intended to
do things the way they wanted to because they were so corrupt. That was one of
the most corrupt periods of the Roman Catholic Church. They just didn't intend
to pay attention to the authority of Scripture. They were forced to separate.
You had the
original separation of Lutherans. That was pretty much confined to Germany and
areas in Scandinavia where Lutheran missionaries went. Then you had the development
of Calvinism, the followers of John Calvin, in French speaking Switzerland and
France. They also had a heavy influence among a lot of British clergy in what
became known as the Anglican Church. Then later on you had the development of
the Anabaptist movement, a movement that means to be baptized again. Everyone
was being baptized as an infant. That was a part of their introduction into
citizenship as well as into the church. The Anabaptists came along and said
that had no spiritual value because baptism is supposed to be a statement about
your personal faith in Christ as Savior. These are your basic groups that split
out.
Because you
still had this orientation and uniting of church and state in Germany, France,
and England where even today the king or the queen of England is the head of
the Anglican Church, you still had these state religions. You had German
Lutheranism and Swedish Lutheranism and you had Dutch Reformed and French
Reformed and Scottish Reformed and all these different things.
Then in the
United States after the American War for Independence there was no state
identification with the denominations, they splintered into all kinds of
different ways. It could be as trivial as this person looked cross-eyed, that
person didn't read his Bible the same way another person did, and they
fragmented into different groups. But you still had your major denominations.
You had one Presbyterian Church. You had some Cumberland Presbyterians and a
few others. You had basically one Baptist denomination with a couple of smaller
ones. You had these subgroups, the freewill Baptists and a few others. You had
the development of the Methodist Church, which was a break off from the
Anglican Church starting in the late 1700s.
You had all
these different groups but then they split again at the time of the Civil War.
You had Northern Baptists, Southern Baptists, Northern and Southern
Presbyterians, Northern Church of Christ and Southern Church of Christ so
everything just multiplied more and more and more. Then with the introduction
of 19th century liberalism your northern denominations tended to go
liberal and reject the authority of Scripture faster than your southern groups.
That led into
what became known as the fundamentalist/modernist controversy. This really hit
the north hardest at first. These denominations began to fragment at different
times and in different ways but they fragmented over doctrine. You would have a
certain number of Christians, for example in the Northern Baptist denomination
as they officially went liberal, who would become sort of fed up with where
they were going at different times. One group would leave in one decade and
another group of conservatives would leave 10 years later and then another
group of conservatives would leave ten years later still.
That gave rise
to various smaller denominations such as GARB, General Assembly of Regular Baptists, and
Conservative Baptists. What happened was the Bible-believing fundamentalist and
conservatives always lost. They lost property, church buildings, seminaries,
Bible colleges, missionary organizations. They had to start all over again in
the early 20th century. Out of that came the development of a lot of
conservative fundamentalist seminaries.
The reason they
were called fundamentalists is that they believed in the fundamentals of the
faith, which meant they believed in the infallibility and inerrancy of
Scripture, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, miracles such as the
physical, bodily resurrection of Christ, and all of these doctrines were very
important. They were published in a book called The Fundamentals of the Faith. If you
believed in those things, such as a literal second coming of Christ, then you
were a fundamentalist.
It's not
something that's militant. It's something that believes in the basics of what
the Bible teaches. What happened was that they had to start all over again. You
had seminaries like Dallas Theological Seminary, you had Bible colleges like
Moody Bible Institute' which started in the late 19th century but
was basically a product of this. BIOLA which is the Bible Institute of Los
Angeles; all of these different schools, including Wheaton were started about
then. All of these were a product of this new group of
fundamentalists/evangelicals.
Then starting
about the 1970s, everything sooner or later starts to detonate because of the
corruption of sin and you had bad doctrine infiltrate to those different
organizations. For the last thirty or forty years some of those stalwart
schools no longer believe unequivocally in a literal historical Genesis
1–11. In fact, there's only one faculty member I know of in the Old
Testament department at Dallas Theological Seminary who believes in that or in
a young earth. It was not that way when I was a student forty years ago.
Genesis 1–11 implies a young earth.
The Bible
implies a model of the spiritual life that enables a believer to face and
handle all problems in life. But now since the 50s or 60s you've had the
intrusion of Christian psychology. It's not just enough to know the Bible as a
pastor to help people. You have to have subsequent training in counseling and
in psychology so you can really, really help people. You not only had the
intrusion of human viewpoint science into the creation/evolution issue, you have
the intrusion of sociology and psychology into the spiritual life.
And how do you
plant churches? How do you develop churches? Modern church growth literature is
loaded with sociological, human viewpoint influence. You also have in language
study, at the seminary where you study Hebrew and Greek, and your professor has
gone off and he's studied linguistics at some place. He's picked up a few ideas
here or there that really aren't kosher. He's young and he really hasn't had
time to think through a lot of things yet and most linguistic studies today are
heavily loaded with presuppositions from post modernism, which teaches that
language and meaning is fluent. You see this when you hear people talk about
that the Constitution is a living document. They believe a postmodern view of
language. It's always changing. It's always moving. It doesn't mean the same
thing all the time.
So what
happened in the fundamentalist/modernist controversy is that you lost
everything in the early 20th century. The fundamentalists and
evangelicals were rebuilding it in the middle of the 20th century
and then they're starting to lose it again. A lot of people don't realize it.
We're in the second stage of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy and most evangelical
Christians are either ignorant of it or they don't care. That's really sad
because every institution that was founded in the early part of the 20th
century on a solid biblical basis is no longer there. They have all
compromised.
Some have had some
good battles and they've recovered. Page Patterson who's the president of
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary—previously he was at Southeastern
Baptist Seminary—did a great job of reversing those seminaries. In the
context of this, these major denominations won and fundamentalists lost. Well,
these liberal denominations had compromised so much of faith that they slipped
into what is now modern ecumenicalism. Now modern ecumenicalism is the contrast
to biblical unity. It says for everyone to get along together and if we have
beliefs where we disagree we'll just get rid of them. They believe that what
matters is that we all have the same experience and we all love each other.
They want to go
out and change society. That's what's wrong with modern ecumenism. It began in
the early part of the 20th century and it's a counterfeit unity. It
gave rise to organizations such as the World Council of Churches and many other
organizations like that. Many of them are dominated by socialism and other
forms of Marxism; they're also dominated by incipient or overt forms of
anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. They've rejected biblical truth and that's
really the unity factor with them.
When we talk
about what we've been studying in Romans 15 I went through what appeared to be
a digression but we have to understand what it means to be like-minded. There
are a lot of Christians out there who want to be like-minded. They're out there
in the United Presbyterian and the United Methodist and the United Church of
Christ and they're all hugging each other. They've all gone ecumenical in the
bad sense of the word.
What about the
rest of us who are still trying to be biblical? We understand that the basis
for unity is the Scripture. Ephesians 4:1-6 gives us that foundation. Paul
says, "I therefore the prisoner of the Lord beseech you to walk worthy of
the calling with which you were called. With all lowliness and gentleness and
long-suffering…" These are three virtues of the Christian life. These are
repeated either in pairs or all together in other passages. Lowliness is TAPEINOPHROSUNE, which means humility. Humility was not valued by the
Greeks at all. It was not a virtue to be humble so they didn't like it but Paul
says with humility and gentleness. Gentleness is the word PRAOTES which is a synonym of TAPEINOPHROSUNE and indicates meekness in a biblical sense.
Meekness means
someone who is strong and oriented to authority. This isn't someone who can
just be rolled over or taken advantage of. Moses was the meekest man in the Old
Testament. Now Moses was taking 3 million rebellious Jews for forty years
through the desert. He was not a pushover. He was very strong. What the Bible
means by meek is to be oriented to authority. Longsuffering means patience, to
endure in difficult circumstances. So this is how we are able to bear one
another with love is because it's grounded in basically these virtues of grace
orientation. Humility, meekness, and longsuffering.
That means that
we endeavor to keep the peace. The word for endeavor is the same word that is
translated, "study to show yourself approved unto God". It doesn't
really mean study but in that context it kind of does because it means to work
hard at something, to labor intensely over a particular kind of activity. The
context of Timothy is to the idea of reading and getting into the Word. That's
why it's translated study there. In Hebrews it has the idea of working hard and
endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit.
It's not a
sociological unity. It's not a unity because we all call ourselves Christians
because we're not Jewish and we're not Muslims and we're not atheists and we're
not pagans so we're Christians so we can just have an experience of warmth
together and just hug one another and say "Oh, wasn't it good to have been
together tonight? Let's do this next week. But let's not study the Bible
because that will just divide us.'
The unity in
Ephesians is a unity of the spirit based on faith. Colossians 3:12 talks about
these same three virtues, "As the elect of God [believers], holy and
beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, and
longsuffering." There are those virtues again. They're the foundation for
the Christian life. Now back to Ephesians 4:4-6, where Paul talks about this
unity. There's one body. There's one spirit. But just because there's one body
and one spirit doesn't mean we ignore differences. There are some differences
that we have to pay attention to. Those are doctrinal differences. We have to
divide over doctrinal issues.
You have to be
careful, though. You don't divide over petty things. You don't divide over
things that are doubtful things. You don't divide over whether or not you play
a piano or some other instrument. You don't divide over the color [and I'm not
being facetious here because there are churches who divide over this]; what
color you paint the church or what kind of steeple you have or whether you have
pews or whether you have chairs. You don't divide over a lot of things churches
divide over. That's just arrogance that causes that division.
Our unity is
based on one Lord, Jesus Christ. We have to have a proper Christology. One
faith. That refers to not just believing but a body of doctrine, what is
believed. There is one body of doctrine and it's the infallible Word of God.
One baptism and that's the baptism by God the Holy Spirit. One God and Father
of all who is above all and through all and in all." This is the basis for
real Christian unity.
What happened
coming out of the early 20th century with the rise of ecumenicalism
is that all of these fundamental evangelical churches that were spawned during
that time, left their churches because they realized that their pastor didn't
believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. Or in some cases the church
got a new pastor such as a Methodist church that got a new pastor in old
Houston Heights in about 1932. He was a classic 19th century
Protestant liberal. He didn't believe in the infallibility of Scripture. He
didn't believe in the physical, bodily resurrection of Christ. He didn't
believe in the substitutionary atonement.
There was a man
who taught a Sunday school class there for young couples that was quite large
and quite popular. His new pastor called him in and told him he couldn't teach
Sunday school anymore because of his fundamentalist beliefs. This man left and
he took his Sunday school class with him and they started a new church. He
decided to name it after the church he had come from in the Pittsburgh area
called Berachah Church.
That's how
Berachah Church got started. Their first pastor was a young red-headed guy who
played football at Wheaton College, named Elwood Evans. He was known as Red
Evans. He married John Walvoord's wife's sister. He and Walvoord had gone
through seminary together. He was the pastor of that church for about five
years but that was really a pattern for how a lot of Bible churches got started
in the early 20th century. They had been part of a liberal church
and they left.
What happened
is these people got their feelings hurt and I mean that mostly in a good way
because when you have been maltreated by what you have been devoted to for many
years and you were abused and kicked out, you're going to be a little
protective at that point. So a lot of these independent churches threw the baby
out with the bath water.
The problem
with independent churches is they're too independent. They say the problem is
denominations. The problem wasn't denominations. The problem was false doctrine
so they developed this anti-denominational framework and they all split off
into their little atomistic groups. They lost a lot of clout. They lost their
buildings. They lost their seminaries.
Some of them
would get together in loose associations. They recognized they only had about
$4,000.00 to give to missions and another group had $4,000.00 and they could
get two other churches and if they co-operated they could support a missionary
on the mission field. They all basically believed the same things.
In the Houston
area you had churches like Berachah and Minotex, which is Fellowship Bible
Church of Pearland now, I think. And Almeda Bible Church which has a new name
and Spring Branch Bible Church, which is now Bridgepoint out on I-10. Spring
Branch, Minotex, and Almeda were all started during the era of World War I.
They would get together and they supported Dallas Seminary. They supported some
of the same missionaries so when those missionaries came back to Houston they
could minister in the same four or five churches because that's where they got
most of their missionary support. They understood the value of working together
in a co-operative way. They didn't sacrifice in any way their independence.
That's a value
among believers. We do something like that with Camp Arete. There are people
from eight or nine doctrinal churches who all work together to put together a
camp every summer. The pastors all work together. They're involved in Chafer
Seminary. The problem you run into is that you still have people who think that
if one pastor talks to another pastor, it's ecumenicalism. That's what's called
shooting yourself in the foot. We have to work together. The unity of Christ
doesn't sacrifice doctrine. But if you're not sacrificing doctrine, if you're
not sacrificing the integrity of the local church, then churches should work
together and co-operate together. We're stronger together than we are
separately and independently.
You know,
pastors are some of the most ego-sensitive people I've ever known. It's real
easy for pastors to succumb to competitiveness. There are some pastors who are
so competitive they won't have anything to do with any other churches or any
other pastors because they're afraid that somehow they won't be thought of very
highly. But we're not in competition. We're all serving the Lord. We're all
trying to do our best and we should be cooperating with one another. We
shouldn't be fighting and dividing over things. The churches are not supposed
to be built on isolationism. We should all be supportive.
This is what
these scriptures are talking about in terms of being like-minded, having a
focus on the Word of God. So unity is fundamental but it's a unity on the basis
of doctrine, not at the expense of doctrine. Now that ties us back to verses 5
and 6, which emphasize the fact we're to receive one another. Then we get into
the next section next time where Paul relates what Jesus Christ did to Jew and
Gentile. That helps us understand that when he says to receive one another he's
saying that there should be unity between Jew and Gentile despite the fact they
have different traditions and different cultural backgrounds. They should be
united as believers in Rome. So we'll come back and begin at verse 8 next time.