[Romans 15: 1-7]
Verse divisions and chapter divisions in the New Testament were added centuries after the Bible was written. So be careful that you don’t assume they divide the books in the best places. The chapter break at the beginning of chapter 15 was not put in the best place, most commentators agree. It would go much more naturally after Romans 15:13. The issue of weak and strong Christians—those free to eat and drink without qualms of conscience—continues from chapter 14 right on into chapter 15.
Verses 1-2 make a familiar point: “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.” This is not new. We have seen it before. Romans 14:15, “If your brother is grieved by what you eat, you are no longer walking in love.” Romans 14:19, “Let us pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding.” Romans 14:21, “It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble.” So the point throughout has been: be willing to forego your freedom in matters of meat and drink and days if you can avoid destroying a weak brother and instead build his faith.
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Paul’s goal is never merely good human relations—unless, of course, we define “good human relations” as God-glorifying, Christ-exalting human relationships, which we should do. But the ultimate aim of Christ and his apostle is to display the glory of God—the beauty of God, the greatness of God, the many-sided perfections of God. All of creation, all of redemption, all of church, all of society and culture exist to display God. Nothing and no one is an end itself, but only God. All things are “from him and through him and to him” (Romans 11:36). Church worship services, church Sunday School classes, church nurseries, church committee meetings, church small groups, church evangelism, church missions—all of them exist for this one ultimate thing—to make much of the greatness of God. That is why we say we exist to “spread a passion for the supremacy of God.”
Would you join me and pray with me that God make this the atmosphere at Bethlehem? We will not have succeeded if we are known as a friendly place. And we will not have succeeded if we are known as an unfriendly place. We will be on our way to true success if we are known as a people besotted with the glory of God. If our children speak of the glory of God. If our young people love the glory of God more than the glory of sport or music or fashion. If our career people pursue the glory of God more than the glory of financial success. If our older people rejoice in the hope of the glory of God just over the horizon.
Almost everything in American culture threatens this radically serious, God-centered passion to see and savor and show the glory—the greatness and beauty and worth of the full range of his perfections, his eternal being and unchanging character, his independence and self-sufficiency and holiness, his infinite power and wisdom and goodness and justice and wrath and mercy and patience and grace and love. Almost everything in American culture threatens to make our devotion and our services and our mind and our heart shallow and casual and chatty and—our most favorite blessing of choice—fun.
I plead with you to pray with me that God stagger us with a proper sense of his greatness, and to that end that he would give us what Paul calls a “spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him” (Ephesians 1:17). Oh, how we need to know God and to feel something of the wonder of his glory. Pray with Moses in Exodus 33:18, “Show me your glory.”
So we know where Paul is going in this text—the same place he is always going: “That together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 6).
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