Romans chapter 1. I titled the message to all that
be in Rome. That's who this message is to.
To all the saints that are in Rome. I can say this morning
to all the saints in Spring Lake, this is written for us too. I
want to take notice this morning of of Paul's prayer for the church
at Rome. Paul's prayer always contained
thanksgiving and praise to God first. God was first in his prayers. When he prayed to God, he thanked
God for the people, he thanked God for His grace, His mercy,
and he thanked God for all the spiritual blessings. that we
have been given in the Lord Jesus Christ. And we should never forget
those things. We should always call those things
to remembrance. Every day we ought to think of
the blessings that we have in Christ. God chose us in Christ,
loved us in Christ. And we ought to always give thanks
for that. Never get over that. Never get over that. God loved
you, chose you, called you, regenerated you, gave you a new birth, born
of God. I'm looking at some people that are born of God. That's
an amazing fact, to be born of God. Now verse seven tells us
that this letter is to a certain people, a singled out people, to all
that be in Rome. The Bible is written for the
most part, to believers. It's written to God's people.
That's who it's written to. It has warnings for unbelievers,
but for the most part, it's for believers. Remember the Lord
said to His disciples, don't cast your pearls before swine.
And if He told the disciples not to do that, He's not going
to do that. This is written for us and for our learning. These
things the Scripture says were written for our examples that
we have throughout the Word of God. It's for us. And it's written to a people
who've been singled out by the grace of God. God singled you
out, you personally. He singled you out. You singled
out by the grace of God and by the love of God. The love that
God loves us with is an everlasting love. There's never a time, there's
never been a time that God did not love me. that God did not
love His people. Never a time. There was a time
I did not love my wife. I didn't know her. There was
a time I didn't know Vicki. I didn't know she existed. But
there's never been a time that we have never existed with God. He conceived us. Before this
world began, I mean before creation, God conceived Me and you who
believe. He conceived us in Christ. He
loved us in Christ. And that love has never diminished
one iota. Never. It has never wavered one
bit. He has loved us with an everlasting
love. And because He loved us, because
Paul calls them the beloved of God. You are the beloved of God. And I need as a pastor to keep
that in front of me all the time. I'm speaking to a people that
are beloved of God. These are God's loved ones. His
loved ones. And because God loved you, He's
called you to be saints. Now actually, to be was supplied
by the translators because it's not in the original Greek text.
It reads like this, called saints. Beloved of God, called saints.
That's why you're called saints, God loved you. Because God loved
you, he sanctified you, he set you apart. Here in Spring Lake,
out of all this population around here, you've got Raleigh, you've
got Fayetteville, you've got all the, God Almighty has singled
you out. He singled you out, and He's
made you to be one of His, and by doing so, He has sanctified
you. He sanctified you, and you're
called saints. You're not going to be saints.
You're not going to wait till you die, and then later on, you
know, you can be called a saint, or you get to be a saint when
you get to heaven. No, you're one now, or you're
not going to be there. You're sanctified now. You're
set apart. That is, you are set apart for
God. You're set apart by God for God. And not only are you set apart,
but you've been made holy. In Jesus Christ, you are holy. You're as holy as God is in Jesus
Christ. You're as righteous as He is. Now, I want you to notice something
here as we go along. When Paul writes this, he said,
to all that be in Rome, Rome was the seat of learning, it
was the seat of culture, and it was the seat of the greatest
evil on earth. Everything went in Rome. Some
of the most vile things were legal in Rome. Some of the most wicked things
went on in Rome. And this church is made up, or
was made up, of those Roman citizens who lived like that at one time.
I mean, what a miraculous change. If you go back and you do a little
research of the Roman Empire, what it was like in those days,
and all that they ever knew, this is all they ever knew was
that kind of lifestyle. And then the gospel comes along.
God sends the gospel right where Satan's seat is, right there
in Rome. Rome was considered the capital of the world at that
time. And here God raises up a people.
Out of all those Roman citizens, God has a people there, and he
raises them up. He saves them by his grace. And they are a holy people. They
are a people that used to live in paganism. They used to live
in idolatry. And now they live in a godly
life and they're walking after holiness. And you know that their
friends and everybody they knew there in Rome was like, there's
something different about these people. They don't do this no
more. They don't go here no more. God has made such a change in
them, as you'll see here in just a little bit. But here's Paul's
prayer. He says in verse eight, he says,
first, first, There's an order to prayer. There's a real order
to prayer if we give thought to what we're praying and to
the one we're praying to. Prayer is not babble. Prayer
is just not off the top of your head. It's from the heart. It's to God. And it's about a
subject. We pray for a matter or for people. We pray for them and we pray
for them earnestly. And we understand who we are
going before. We are going before Almighty God. Prayer should always include,
also in this matter of prayer, not only just thought, forethought,
but it should include praise and thanksgiving for all that
God has done for us. It's good to recount those things. Here we are this morning with
an interest in the gospel. how we ought to praise and thank
God that we have an interest in the gospel. I know many people,
many people I grew up with, people in the family, they have no interest
in the gospel whatsoever. And I do. Why? Because God, because God singled
me out, called me by his grace and revealed his son in me. That's
why I believe the gospel. That's why. And I thank God for
it. I thank God for it. And then when we give praise
and thanksgiving to God, it strengthens faith because it makes you consider
all that He has done for you. It makes you consider it. And
then it puts the heart in the right frame for praying. When
you go before the throne of grace with, first of all, a spirit
of gratitude, a spirit of thanksgiving, it puts the heart in the right
frame of mind when you're standing before God and praying. And then true prayer shows gratitude
for past mercies. For past mercies. And I'll tell
you something about past mercies. Remembering past mercies. As
God has been, so will he be. He changes not. He changes not. Has God had mercy on me? He'll
continue to have mercy on me. God changes not. And then Paul
says, I thank my God He really gets personal with
this. I thank my God. And here is a covenant relationship
that he's speaking about. Turn over to Hebrews 8. In Hebrews
8, Paul, when he says that God is
my God, he's speaking of a covenant relationship between him and
God. We have a covenant relationship,
just like me and my wife. Me and Vicki, we have a covenant
relationship. Now, we have a personal relationship,
we have a loving relationship, but we have a covenant relationship. When we said, I do, that is a
covenant relationship. And Paul, in saying this, is
saying that he has a covenant relationship with God Almighty. Look in verse 10. For this is the covenant God
said that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,
saith the Lord. I will put my laws into their
mind and write them in their hearts, not just on stone, like
he did at Mount Sinai. It's not on stone, it's in your
heart. The word of God is in your heart. And write them in
their hearts and I will be to them a God and they shall be
to me a people. So Paul says, I thank my God. He's speaking of this one right
here, that is the God of Israel. He is the God of the covenant,
that God of the covenant of grace. And he's saying that he is my
God. God was very real to Paul. God was not a God. He's the living
God and he's my God. how powerful it is to faith,
how powerful it is to the growth of faith, and the strength of
faith, is when you realize that the God of heaven and earth is
my God. When you can say with confidence
now, with full confidence, that God is my God, the God of creation, the God of glory, the God of
salvation, is my God. God is my God. He's not just
my Creator, He's my God. So Paul gets very personal with
it. And by saying this, Paul expresses
a personal relationship with God, not just by covenant, but
this personal relationship. God is my God by election. God
chose me. Christ said, you didn't choose
me, I chose you. You cannot read the Bible and deny the doctrine
of election. You've got to read another Bible.
Either that or you've got to be blind as a bat. You cannot
read this Bible and know that God chose a people in Christ
before the foundation of the world. That's what he says in
Ephesians chapter 1. That we were chosen in Him before the
foundation of the world. All spiritual blessings were
given to us in Christ before the foundation of the world.
He's my God by election. He's my God by redemption. He
bought me. He paid a price for me. Paul
said over in Acts 20, 28, I think it was, or he is, that God purchased
the church, and I'm paraphrasing, he purchased the church by his
own blood. God did that. God did that. When he was telling the bishops
there, the pastors, the overseers of the church, he said, take
heed to yourself. You're over the church of God when you're
preaching to the church of God because this is the church that
God purchased with His own blood. I'm His by election. He chose
me. I'm His by redemption. He bought
me. He purchased me. He paid a price
for me. And I'm His by regeneration,
born of God. God is my Father. My Father owns
it all. Your Father owns it all. and it's my God on whom I call
on your behalf. Do that for me. Do that for me
down through the week. Call on God on my behalf and
I'll call on God on your behalf. It's the same God, same God.
You know, what would make you, just humanly speaking, what would
make you happier than when your children come to you and they
want the best for the other children in the family. And they come
to you and they want the best for me. And they come to you
and they're wanting the best for each other. They're not wanting
to see what they can get out of you for themselves. Their
interest is in their brothers and sisters and their brothers
and sisters, their interest is in You. I tell you, there's nothing make
me happier than Jeremy come to me and say, Dad, won't you do
this for Jason? Or Jason come to me and say,
Dad, won't you do this for Jeremy? And that's what we do for one
another when we go before the throne of grace. I go there for
you, you go there for me. How pleasing that is to God when
his children pray for one another. Then to realize that God is my
God will strengthen faith. I mean, when you realize that
the God of heaven and earth, the God of salvation is my God,
it can do nothing but strengthen your faith. It strengthens your
faith, your hope, your love, all the graces of the spirit
when God is that real to you, when he's that real to you. It'll strengthen you, especially
when you go before the throne of grace to pray. You know, I'm
not going before some distant, cold deity. I'm going before
my God. I'm not going to the throne of
grace to a God that exists, but to my God, who is the only God
there is. And then we see here how to approach
Paul shows us here how to approach God. He said, I thank my God
through Jesus Christ. My God has provided the mediator.
My God has provided a high priest. And my God has provided himself
as the mediator and the high priest. He has provided himself. I have access to God Almighty. I think sometimes we really sit
down and really meditate upon the fact that God is my God and
I have access to Him, we would go before Him a lot more than
we do. A lot more than we do. And everything my God has for
me is through His Son, that Man, Jesus Christ. God Almighty does nothing apart
from Jesus Christ. Nothing. All things are made
by Him and for Him. All things. And it's through
the Lord Jesus Christ that God is my God. Our Lord said this
in John 20, 17. He said, I go to my Father and
your Father, my God and your God. The God and Father of the Lord
Jesus Christ is our God and Father. It is through the Lord Jesus
Christ that we have access to the Father. No man comes unto
the Father but by me. It is through Him that we have
righteousness. It is through Jesus Christ that we have all
spiritual blessings. It is through Jesus Christ that
we have everything we need to stand before God. It is through
Jesus Christ that we stand before God complete. Complete. We don't produce anything. We don't bring anything. If you
invite someone over to dinner, you tell them, just show up.
Don't bring anything, just show up. Our God has provided for us everything
through the Lord Jesus Christ. And because of this, because
God singled you out, He chose you, He loves you with an everlasting
love. You're beloved of God because of this. He's called you to be
saints. He's called you saints because
that is exactly what you are. And the faith that He's given
you is spoken of, He says, throughout the world. Faith is active. James said,
faith without works is dead. Where there's real faith, there's
real activity. Real spiritual activity. And this faith that is spoken
of throughout the world, I was thinking about this and Enoch
came to mind. Enoch. Enoch, it says, walked with God.
And I think that their faith that's spoken of throughout the
world is their day-to-day walk. It was just their day-to-day
walk. Such a change had been made in them, and all the other
Romans that knew them took notice of it. And there was such a change
in them that their faith was spoken of, Paul says, throughout
the world. In other words, Paul says, everywhere
I go, Because you have to realize this, Rome was like New York
City. Everybody was going and coming.
People wanted to visit New York and everybody wanted to visit
Rome. And then the believers that visited Rome, they'd leave
and they'd go back to where they lived and they would tell about
the church in Rome. It stood out so much, that their
faith stood out so much, and there was such a change made
in these people. Those who walked after ungodliness
now walk after godliness. The scripture says, the grace
of God teaches us to deny ungodliness. They quit doing a lot of things
that they were doing. You know, the things that was
so loud, they just said, no, no, no. Their immorality turned to morality.
the things that they thought, the way they thought, the way
they acted, the way they talked, it all changed. And that's why he said,
your faith, it was such a change. It says, your faith is spoken
of throughout the world. Everywhere we go, when those
other Christians go there and visit Rome and they come back
to their home church, home place, they're talking about the church
in Rome. Someone made this observation
I thought was interesting. He said, if this letter to the
Romans, if it had gotten lost in the mail and delivered to
somebody else's house, they would have known exactly where to take
it, to the church in Rome, to the saints in Rome. He said,
they didn't know, that's the only place. And the point the
person was making, and I was reading, he said, if this letter
was mailed to the wrong address in your community, Would they
know to bring it here, to where the gospel preached here? Would
they know to bring it to Bethel? Your faith is spoken of, he said,
throughout the world. It wouldn't matter whose hands
this fell in in Rome. They would know what church it
belonged to, know what group of people there that it belonged
to. It's the saints, the saints in Rome. Their faith was spoken
of. They knew there was something
different about those people. It's like over in 1 Thessalonians.
Turn over there to 1 Thessalonians. What a change God makes when
He saves a sinner. He says in 1 Thessalonians 1,
in verse 4, "'Knowing, brethren, beloved, your election of God,
our gospel came not unto you in word only, but in power and
in the Holy Ghost, in much assurance, as you know what manner of men
we were among you for your sakes. And you became followers of us
and of the Lord, having received the word, the gospel, in much
affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost. So that you were examples
to all that believe in Macedonia, they all talked about you in
Achaia. For from you sounded out the word of the Lord, the
gospel went out from you. And not only in Macedonia and
Achaia, but also in every place your faith to God was spread
abroad, so that we need not to speak anything that they tell
us. They themselves show of us what
manner of entering in we had unto you, how you turned to God
from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for
His Son from heaven, whom He raised from the dead, even Jesus,
which delivered us from the wrath to come." What a change! What a change! They were steeped
in idolatry. They were bowing before statues,
and they made shrines and everything to these false gods. But the
gospel came to town. And what a change it made. What
a change. And that gospel makes the same
change in you as it made in them. It makes the same change in us.
Where there's real faith, there's real change. There's real activity. And Paul lets them know there
in verses 9-13, here we see the heart of the pastor. Paul is
an apostle, yes. But Paul had the heart of a pastor.
God gave him the heart of a pastor. There's some men who've been
called to preach, couldn't be a pastor. There's some that couldn't
be a pastor, but they can preach. God called them to preach and
they can go around and preach, but they couldn't be a pastor. But Paul, Paul had the heart
of a pastor. While he's at Troas, he's thinking
of the Corinthians. While he's going to write to
the Corinthians, he agonizes. He weeps on how to write this
letters because he wants them to know that he's writing it
in love. He loves that church because Jesus Christ loved them. He loved them. And he lets them
know here how much he wanted to visit them and that he could
be a benefit to them and they could rejoice together. He said,
and oftentimes I had purposed to come there, but, and I told
you some of this in the Bible class. He said, oftentimes I
purposed to come there, but I was hindered. I was hindered. You
know why he was hindered? I don't know all the reasons
why. But we wouldn't have the book of Romans if he wasn't hindered.
We wouldn't have this book. Because he would have visited
them and they would have talked and discussed these things. And
we would not have had the book of Romans. And there's no book,
there is no book in the Word of God that is complete as the
book of Romans on the doctrines of the gospel. I mean, it is
about the most complete book you'll find at all in the Word
of God. And we wouldn't have had it if
Paul hadn't been hindered. Thank God he hindered him, because
he hindered him not just for them, but for us also. This is
for us. And then Paul says here in verse
14, he saw himself as a debtor. one with an obligation. God has
called me, put me in the ministry. I have an obligation. And I have
an obligation to preach the gospel. He said in one place, woe is
me if I preach not the gospel. I have an obligation to preach
the gospel, and I have an obligation to preach the gospel to the educated
and to the uneducated, to the barbarian, to the wise, the unwise. You know, the Greeks called anyone
that was not educated, you know, by the Greeks or in Rome, they
called them barbarians. That's what they were called
by the Romans. And so Paul says, I am a debtor to preach to all
men. It doesn't matter. It doesn't
matter of race or place. He said, I'm indebted to do it. God put me in the ministry. And
because of that, he says, in verse 15, I'll close, I'm ready. I'm ready to preach the gospel
to you that are in Rome." Now, you know, for someone to say,
I'm ready to preach the gospel to you at Spring Lake, you know,
it's like Lance Heller, you know, if he's coming over here in a
month or whatever, if he could say, I'm ready to preach the
gospel to you at Spring Lake. Well, that would be good, wouldn't
it? That would be good, but it wouldn't be dangerous. That wouldn't
be dangerous for him. Nero, the emperor, hated Christianity. You're talking about putting
your life, that'd be like me saying, I'm ready to preach the gospel to
you in Iraq. That's what it'd be like, or over in Baghdad.
But Paul said, I'm not afraid to preach the gospel to you at
Rome. I'm ready to come. He knew the dangers of it. He
knew that Christianity was hated. Nero put them to death. He burned
them at the stake and fed them to the beast. I mean, it was
awful what was happening to them. I mean, they had to really stand
for the gospel. If they're going to stand for
the gospel, they had to make a stand. And Paul says, I'm ready. I'm ready to come right where
the seat of Satan is and preach the gospel to you at Rome. You
know what's interesting? God had saved this some sinners
there in Rome, he raised up this church, and some of those were
in the palace. Some of those were in the palace, right there
in Caesar's house. You can't keep the gospel out.
If God's purpose is to save someone, there's nothing that can stop
it. It can't be stopped. God cannot be put in check. Nothing
can put God in check. No one can put God in check.
He even saved some there in Caesar's palace. But Paul says, I'm ready
to preach the gospel. It doesn't matter if it's a place
where the gospel is accepted, or if it's a place where it's
hated. If that's where God wants me to be, then that's where I'll
be. But Paul says here, and let me
just close with this. In his prayer, he says, God is
my God. He's my God. He's the one I'm
calling on for you. His salvation is real. That's
what's encouraging to me to stand here week after week, is that
my God is God. His salvation is real. There's
no one He cannot save if God's will is to save that person. It is not of Him that willeth,
nor of Him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy. And
I know that God can save any sinner. I know that. I know His
salvation is real. I know His salvation is through
Jesus Christ. And I know His salvation is for
sinners. I have a gospel for sinners.
I don't have a gospel for anybody else. No one else. Just for sinners. Just for sinners. All right.