Some of you are probably familiar with the work of J. I. Packer—most likely his book Knowing God, if nothing else.  I had the privilege of taking several classes from him at Regent.  You had to pay attention, and no mistake.  His lectures were dense—he always said, “Packer by name, and packer by nature”; plus, he’s a Brit of the old style, very formal, very reserved, and even by English standards his sense of humor is dry as bone.  If you appreciate that, though (and I do), he’s really quite funny.  At first glance, he might seem all intellect and no heart, but that’s nowhere close to being true.  You can see that quite clearly in Knowing God; we saw it in many ways in his lectures, and perhaps most of all in his favorite saying, which was sort of a purpose statement for all his theology classes:  “Theology leads to doxology.”

In other words, we don’t just study about God so that we know more stuff, or so that we can win arguments or tell people what they’re supposed to do; nor is this about our own empowerment, or getting us what we want.  If those are the kinds of results that our theology produces, we’ve gone very wrong.  What we do as we read the Bible, as we pray, as we study together and teach one another, isn’t primarily about us, and it isn’t determined by our goals, our desires, or our ideas of how things ought to be.  It’s about God, and seeing him as he truly is, not as our passions and fears drive us to imagine him; and not just so that we know things about him, but so that we come to know him, as we come to know our family and closest friends.  And the more that happens—the more clearly we see him and the more truly we know him—the more we’re moved to worship.

It’s fitting, then, that as Paul closes his longest and most theologically dense letter, he does something that he doesn’t do anywhere else:  he ends with a doxology, with a song of praise.  That’s ultimately what all this is about, what his whole letter has been for, that the Roman church—and all others who would hear or read his words—would under­stand God’s holiness and glory and goodness and grace somewhat better, and would be inspired to bow before God and worship him.

It does matter that we believe what is true about God, so that we worship him truly; thus we have this digression in verses 17-19.  His greeting in verse 16 from the churches he founded brings to mind the fights he’s had in those churches, and so he warns the Romans:  there are false teachers out there, and they’ll be coming after you.  Be wise enough to see through their lies, and avoid them.  But again, this isn’t about being able to out-argue false teachers.  We counter their lies with truth, but not so that we can win the argument; we don’t want to focus on the argument.  The point is to keep our focus where it belongs:  on God the Father, Jesus Christ his Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Thus Paul ends with praise “to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ.”  What is Paul’s gospel?  It is exactly the preaching of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.  It is the triumphant declaration that Jesus has done the impossible, and has saved us when we could not be saved any other way.  This isn’t about Paul; he calls it “my gospel” not because the gospel belongs to him, but because he belongs to the gospel.

This is how God strengthens us; this is how he gives us hope and peace to stand firm—through the relentless and joyful proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ.  The world tries to create them through symptom control, on the personal level (through self-help programs and medications) and on the national level (through laws and programs), but those aren’t enough; and if the church just offers Christianized versions of the same, we’re selling everyone short.  Those things have their place, but they only deal with the effects of sin; they can’t address the real issue, the heart of the matter.  At every level, at every point, by every means, we need to be proclaiming the gospel.  Only that truly strengthens us and enables us to stand firm because only the gospel goes to the root of the problem.  It’s God’s answer to sin—and he’s answered it once and for all.

This is, Paul says, “according to the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the com­mand of the eternal God.”  Those prophetic writings were centuries old; why does he say the mystery is nowrevealed through texts written long before?  The answer has to do with the na­ture of mystery.  In the biblical sense, it doesn’t mean God was concealing his plan, or the truth about himself; mystery is something hidden in plain sight, not by any effort of God to disguise it, but by our inability to understand it—or, even more importantly, ex­peri­ence it.  The prophets pointed to the mystery and proclaimed what God would do, but no one really understood them; but when Jesus came and fulfilled the prophets, the world saw what they meant, and their message became clear for the first time.

Why?  “So that all nations might believe and obey him.”  The gospel is not just one way to God, for one culture or one sort of people; it’s the one way God has provided for salvation for all people.  His plan is broader than just Israel, and broader than any other nation or group we might name; his purpose is for the whole world, and indeed for all creation.  And it’s his purpose that matters in the end, not ours, and his plan that carries through, not ours, because he’s God, and we’re not.  It’s his to decree, and ours to obey.

The one who has done all this, and is able to do all this, is the only wise God.  It’s his wisdom that formed a plan for the redemption of the world after our rebellion broke it and shrouded it with darkness, and his wisdom that set the plan in motion and brought it to completion.  His wisdom is fully expressed—is incarnated, made flesh and bone—in Jesus Christ, and it’s in Jesus Christ and him alone that we have been saved, or can be saved; thus it is through Jesus Christ that we give him glory.  His glory is forever, as he is forever, as his wisdom is forever, as his gift of life is forever; and so our worship is forever, for he deserves nothing less.  He has saved us, he has set us free from darkness and shadow, he has delivered us from death and given us his life; he has given us hope in a world of despair, peace in a world of anxiety, joy in a world of grief, and love in a world of bitterness and hatred.  To the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ!  Amen.  Let’s pray.

It’s typical of Paul to greet various people at the end of a letter, but nowhere else does he greet so many.  It makes sense; the church as a whole is unfa­miliar with him, and so he sends greetings to everyone in the whole church that he does know—which is to say, all the people who can vouch for him.  That’s an ulterior motive, though, merely a reason the list is so long; it isn’t Paul’s primary purpose here.  You can see that by what he says about those whom he names:  his focus isn’t on himself, it’s on them.  We don’t know much about most of these folks; for most of them we can’t even guess much; but from what we do know we can be sure there are some great stories behind this passage.

Phoebe was a Gentile convert from the church at Kenkhreai—the eastern port for the city of Corinth—and apparently the person carrying the letter to Rome.  Paul calls her a deacon; the formal structure of church offices was only beginning to develop, but it seems safe to say that Phoebe was a recognized leader of the church with responsibility for visiting the sick, caring for the poor, and quite likely helping manage whatever money the church there had.  She was clearly wealthy and socially prominent, since Paul names her as a benefactor or patron to him and to many in the church.  This probably means that the church met in her home for worship, but there’s more than that here.  The word Paul uses was actually a technical term for someone who came to the aid of others, and particularly foreigners, providing them with financial and legal assistance.  In a busy seaport like Kenkhreai, this would have been especially important, and it seems likely that Phoebe took up this ministry on behalf of visiting Christians—including Paul.  Now, he says, she needs the Roman church to serve her as she has served so many others.

After commending Phoebe to the Roman church, Paul greets his old friends and co-workers Prisca and Aquila; you probably know Prisca better by her nickname, Priscilla, since that’s how Luke refers to her in the book of Acts.  They were Jewish Christians whom Paul first met in Corinth—they had been expelled from Rome along with all other Jews by Claudius—and they played a major part with him in the founding and growth of the church in Ephesus.  By this point, Claudius has died and they’ve returned to Rome, and are no doubt among the chief leaders of the church there.  Paul notes that they risked their necks to save his—we don’t have that story, but it was most likely during his three years in Ephesus; for that reason and many others, he isn’t exaggerating when he says that “all the churches of the Gentiles” give thanks for them.

In verse 7, we have greetings addressed to another pair of Greek-speaking Jews.  This verse has been made a point of argument over the ordination of women, but it shouldn’t be.  The text is clear:  Paul greets a husband and wife, Andronicus and Junia—just like Aquila and Prisca, or Philologus and Julia—who he says are “esteemed among the apostles.”  Which is most likely to say that like Prisca and Aquila, they were a married couple who traveled, and who used their travels to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ.  The fact that they had been imprisoned for the gospel, like Paul, bears this out.

Of the rest, we can say much less.  Epainetus, the first Christian convert in Asia, must have come to faith through the work of Prisca and Aquila, and perhaps came to Rome with them.  Herodion, and the household of Aristobulus—we can’t be sure, but this is likely Aristobulus the brother of King Herod Agrippa I, who killed James the brother of John and tried to kill Peter.  Aristobulus was dead by this point, but it appears the church had spread even into his family and their servants.  Rufus may well be the son of Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross of Christ part of the way to Golgotha; we don’t know for sure, but there’s good reason to think so.

Obviously, we don’t know much, and we can’t even guess much.  There’s one thing we can say for sure about every person greeted here:  Paul considered them worthy of honor.  Just look what he says about them.  “My fellow workers in Christ”—“my fellow prisoners”—“my beloved in the Lord”—“approved in Christ”—“chosen in the Lord”—“workers in the Lord”—“Greet Mary, who has worked hard for you”—“Greet the beloved Persis, who has worked hard in the Lord.”  He values these people for their faithful service to the Lord and his church, including in many cases to Paul himself; he greets them because he wants to honor them, and to hold them up for the church to honor.

And you know, he succeeded, far beyond anything he could have imagined.  Even with those for whom we know nothing more than their names, we at least know their names; we’ve at least heard of them.  Everyone they knew, or almost everyone, has been forgotten for nearly two thousand years—but their names are still remembered, and with them, Paul’s approval.  And more than that, this may be just a list of names, but it’s still Scripture, it’s just as inspired by God as any other passage in this book.  If Paul honored them for their faithfulness, I think we can safely say that Jesus honored them, too.

This matters.  I preached a sermon last week basically promising you blood and pain and strife if you follow Jesus, and you know, I won’t take back a word of it; but you could be excused for wondering, if that’s what following Jesus gets you, why bother?  This world values comfort, ease, material wealth, security (financial and otherwise), physical pleasure, and that’s just not what Jesus promises his people.  Oh, you might get those things, but you might not—and if you do, it might not really be a blessing.  So, if not any of those things, what do we get out of this gig, anyway?

There are several parts to that answer, many of which we’ve talked about before; one of the most obvious, of course, is eternal life.   Part of this, too, though, is honor.  It’s not about reputation, which is ultimately in the world’s hands.  Lois McMaster Bujold, in one of herVorkosigan novels, has the protagonist’s father tell him, “Reputation is what other people know about you.  Honor is what you know about yourself.”  A little later, he adds, “Guard your honor.  Let your reputation fall where it will.”  From a Christian point of view, the only thing I’d add is that honor is ultimately what Jesus knows about us—which means it’s rooted in the truth that he has redeemed us and paid the penalty for all our sin, and is transforming us by his Holy Spirit.

As such, reputation may come and go, but in Christ our honor is solid; as we follow him, he is making us people of integrity, faithfulness, and true character, worthy of respect, in and through whom he can do his good work.  We don’t need the world’s ap­proval, we have the Lord’s; we don’t need the world to validate us or vindicate us, because he will.  And because we are worthy of honor in his eyes, we will be honored by those who also give him honor.

The flipside to this is that, like Paul, we should honor those who serve the Lord with honor.  This morning, I think especially of those who were here last night doing all the work of a funeral dinner for Deb Eberly’s family, after the death of her sister.  I won’t make them stand, but I honor the service of Sue Gunter, Marilyn Rice, and Alice Seiman, Pam Chastain, and Mary Ann Cox.  We had two craft shows going yesterday, selling peanut brittle to support local missions, and Mom’s Day Out; we had a lot of people busy in service yesterday, some doing more than one thing.  And of course, beyond the activities of the church, we have people serving Christ in many ways—in the health-care system, in the schools of our community, through involvement in mission to other parts of the world, and so on.

“Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of the gates of hell.”  So said the great missionary C. T. Studd, and he lived it.  After graduating from Cambridge in 1883, he went to serve with Hudson Taylor on the China Inland Mission.  From there he went to southern India—to Oota­camund, actually, where Carolyn Dann is now teaching; he pastored a church there from 1900-1906.  He returned to Britain after that, but he didn’t stay; concern for Africa led him to travel to the Sudan and the Congo.  That began the Heart of Africa Mission, which Studd expanded several years later into the Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade, sending workers into South America, Central Asia and the Arab world as well as central Africa.

This is a man who could say in all sincerity, “It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation.”  Paul would have understood him well, for he was energized by the same thing—being on the front lines of God’s work in the world.  Indeed, Paul appeals to that in verses 15-16.  He’s written in quite strong terms to a church he didn’t plant, and he acknowledges that, but he justifies it on the grounds of the grace he was given by God to be a minister to the Gentiles.  Maybe he’s never served in Rome, but he still has flag rank, if you will, and not in some staff position back at head­quarters, either.  He’s been in the heat of the battle for a couple decades now, at God’s specific and express appointment; he has earned the right to speak with authority.

Indeed, to say that Paul served in the heat of the battle is to understate the point; in the spread of the church across the Roman world, he was the tip of the spear, practically a one-man revival, and that’s the role he felt strongly called to play.  You can see it in verse 23—it’s almost plaintive:  “I no longer have any room to work in these regions.”  It’s not as if there were churches all over the place in the eastern Mediterranean; but there were enough that Paul felt he was being squeezed out.  You may remember the story of Daniel Boone, who thought that if he could stand in his yard and see smoke from a neigh­bor’s chimney, the place was getting too crowded and it was time to move; that was about Paul’s attitude.  If there were other Christians around who were ready to lead the church, then it was time for him to head off someplace where that wasn’t true.

Now, most of us, if you were to ask where the front lines are for the church today, would think of Wycliffe, of missionaries to the Muslim world, and people like that; and certainly, that’s true.  What we don’t rightly see is that even more, the front lines run right through Western culture.  Look at Europe, look at Canada; look at New England, or the West Coast.  Look to the mountains—where I last served, I think our best guess was that 9% of the population was in church any given Sunday, and many among that 9% weren’t there for God.  Look to those places, because that’s the direction in which this community is moving—it’s just slower here.  Even here, the front lines between the church and the world begin right at the doorstep.

You might be thinking at this point that you do see this—but the problem isn’t that we don’t see anything, it’s that we don’t see rightly.  One of the greatest lies the Enemy has ever pitched has been to get the church to see spiritual battles in worldly terms, and especially political terms.  He’s gotten us to identify our goals in terms of biblical moral behavior backed by legislation, and in terms of economic results to be achieved by political means.  For some, it’s left-wing concepts of moral behavior and economic fairness, while others hold up right-wing understandings of the same—either way, I assure you, the Devil’s just as happy, because he’s gotten us to identify the kingdom of God with the kingdoms of man, and at that point we’re no longer a threat.  I’m not saying it doesn’t matter what our political ideas are, I’m not saying the laws don’t matter, but I am saying, unless God calls us specifically to that work, all that is secondary.

We need to understand, from the front of our consciousness to the pit of our stomach, that we are on the front lines every bit as much as missionaries in hostile countries; and we need to understand two things about that.  One, our goals and our enemies are not physical but spiritual.  Political parties are not the enemy, and better laws are not the goal.  Our goal is that “those who have never been told of Christ”—or worse, who have been told lies about him—“will see, and those who have never heard will understand”; and that those who do know him will be filled with his love and grace and with the desire to know him better, that we may all be able to teach one another.  Everything we do should be all about the gospel of Jesus Christ, nothing else; and nothing else will heal our community or our nation.

Two, we will suffer; and though our enemy is entirely spiritual, our suffering won’t be.  We will be attacked spiritually, yes, but also emotionally, financially, legally, politically, reputationally, and ultimately physically.  We will hurt, and we will bleed.  We cannot make the mistake of identifying success as the people of God with good circumstances, financial security, and the absence of conflict; in truth, that was always a mistake, but in times when looking Christian was part of the cultural expectation, that mistake was easier to get away with.  Now, “the times, they are a-changin’,” and that’s a confusion we simply cannot afford.  We need to commit to following Jesus Christ with the full understanding that following him may leave us bankrupt, despised, wounded, and maybe even imprisoned—just like Jeremiah, Paul, Jesus . . .

I say this as one to whom wisdom has come late.  I’ve been praying since my early teens that God would bring revival, and that he would use me in part to do it.  I’ve prayed that the Holy Spirit would work through me to win battles for the kingdom of God.  At the same time, I’ve complained every time I got hurt and asked God to make life easier.  He was very gentle with me—it’s only the last few years that I’ve realized that these two sets of prayers are incompatible.  You can have a relatively easy life, far from the front lines, where nothing is really at stake; but if you want to win real victories, you must go to the battle, risking all.  That means—that inevitably means—struggle and strife and hardship and pain; those are part of the necessary price of victory.  As the Duke of Wellington said, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.”

I’m going to do something now, I want you to follow me carefully.  Today of course is Veterans’ Day; all of you who are veterans of the American armed services, please stand.  We honor you for your service, and rightly so, for it is an honorable service for those who serve with honor—and as the depressing news about General Petraeus reminds us, the hardest thing of all is to serve with honor all the way to the very end.

And in that, we profit from your example, and the reminder of your presence.  You are veterans in a particular way, in a particular service to which God called you, of which the risks and the struggles show especially clearly; as such, you provide a model for us in our own service, and we need that.  We need the example of Paul, who could write at the end of his life, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith”; but we need the example of those in our own day who have fought the good fight to the end, to help us do the same.

As Christians, even above our allegiance to this nation, we have a higher allegiance, for we are citizens of the kingdom of God, and we are all on active duty; we are all soldiers against the darkness.  Would you all then please stand.  You are all soldiers in the army of the Lord of Hosts; your battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers and authorities and rulers of the evil of this present age.  You go forth not in your own strength, but in the power of the Spirit of God who is in you, to set free those who are enslaved to sin and deliver them from the hand of death, that they too may be raised up by the Holy Spirit in the life of Jesus Christ our Lord.  The fight will at times be fierce, but you do not fight alone, for we all go forth together; and though there will be losses, yet the victory is certain, for Christ has already won it.  Let’s pray.

As we’ve seen the last couple weeks, Paul is dealing with a conflict in the Roman church between a group who feel they have to keep the Old Testament law in order to please God—it’s a crutch to prop up their faith—and a group of those who understand that they don’t who are quarreling with the first group.  The first group is mostly Jews—not all the Jews in the church, I’m sure, and there were likely a few Gentiles among them, but it’s essentially a Jewish group—and the second is no doubt mostly Gentiles, and so the strife between them has been causing and inflaming division more generally between Jewish and Gentile Christians in Rome.  That’s a lot of why Paul wrote this letter.

In our passage this morning, Paul lays out the bottom line for everything he’s said in chapter 14:  we aren’t in this to please ourselves, we aren’t in this to get what we want, and we have to understand that when we get into a conflict in the church.  Yes, the strong are absolutely correct that they are free in Christ to eat non-kosher meat and ignore the Jewish feast days and festivals—but if they are doing so in a way that hurts others in the church, that’s a sin.  If they’re living to please themselves and not taking thought to what is best for the weaker members of the church, that’s an abuse of their freedom in Christ.  Christ hasn’t set us free to be selfish, he’s set us free from being selfish.

This does not mean, though, that we need to give others in the church whatever they want.  Look at verse 2:  “Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, that is, to build him up.”  The problem with the “strong” in Rome is not that they were making the “weak” believers angry:  their behavior was actually making the weak even weaker, tearing down their faith and making it harder for them to follow Christ.  The point isn’t to keep everyone happy, but to build each other up in faith and help one another grow in spiritual maturity.  Sometimes that means making someone unhappy, challenging them about an issue in their lives and telling them things they don’t want to hear.  The key—note Paul’s use of the word “neighbor,” echoing Jesus’ command to love our neighbors as ourselves—is that everything we do should be done out of love, in a spirit of grace.

We should stop a moment to emphasize that this passage is about our responsibility to others in Christ, not about our expectations from others.  I think I’ve noted before that we like to read the commands in the Bible as addressed to other people, and then try to use the Bible to make them do what we want; but you know, I can’t think of a single passage of Scripture that was written for that purpose.  Like all the rest of this book, this was written for us to apply to ourselves, to learn what God wants us to do; what others are supposed to do for us is not for us to worry about.  It’s between them and God.

In verse 5, Paul ties this back to what he said in chapter 12 and chapter 8.  8:5:  “Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.”  In 12:3 he uses this word to describe the mindset, the perspective, we’re supposed to have about ourselves and our lives; in 12:16 he says the same thing he says here:  “think the same thing toward one another.”  Not “have the same opinions,” not “agree on all the issues”; he’s just spent a chapter and more telling the quarreling factions to respect each other’s views, after all.  He’s on about something deeper.

The point here is the same one he makes to a squabbling church in Philippians 2:  “Let this mind be in you, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who didn’t insist on his rights and cling to his prerogatives, but opened his hands and let them all go to serve us, humbling himself in obedience, even to the point of death on a cross.”  It’s a completely different basis for unity than anything the world knows.  We unify around points of agreement—if you like hymns, you go to this church; if you like electric guitars, you go to that one.  If you have this political view, you go here; if you have that political view, you go there.  If you hold this set of opinions, you vote for the elephant; if you hold that set, you vote for the donkey.  And in so doing, we divide ourselves into all these little groups, and we define ourselves against everyone who thinks different from us.

In Christ, we’re supposed to go deeper than that; our unity isn’t supposed to stop where our uniformity stops.  If you’re unified with those who agree with you on everything you care about, who cares?  Even the world does that.  If we’re in Christ, if we love him and are truly seeking to follow him and to be obedient to his call in our lives, that’s what matters.  We aren’t all going to agree on what that means for what we’re called to do and think; and indeed, we shouldn’t.  Remember Paul’s body imagery—if we were all the same, there would be a lot of necessary parts missing.

We ought to be able to come together in all our differences and disagreements—rockers and classical musicians, hymn-singers and hip-hoppers, Baptists and Presbyterians, and, yes, even liberals and conservatives—and worship together as friends, as brothers and sisters in Christ.  Yes, we disagree on many things, but we ought to recognize that we share one salvation in one Lord through one faith by one grace, and none of us has any claim to stand above anyone else.  The more we appreciate our own desperate need for grace—and even the best of us stands in desperate need, make no mistake—the less we will be inclined to look down on others for their need; and the more we see one another as the beloved of Christ, for whom he died and rose again, the less free we will feel to beat one another up to get our own way.  Which is a good thing, because Jesus does not take it kindly when we hurt someone he loves.

This doesn’t mean soft-pedaling our disagreements, pretending they don’t matter or don’t exist.  We should take each other seriously enough, and trust one another enough, to be open and honest when we disagree, or when we have a problem with some­one in the church, when they’ve hurt us, or even when we just don’t like them.  Talking to other people instead of confronting those with whom we have an issue is just as unloving as attacking people and tearing them down.  But even in our disagreements and our hurts, Paul calls us to receive one another—not merely tolerate one another, but receive one another, as Christ received us; not just as people we have to put up with until we can get rid of them, but as family, as people we love.  He tells us to stand as Christ to one another, not just when it’s easy, but seeking to serve and bless one another even when our disagreements are severe—because that’s when we need it most.  Let’s pray.