Romans 15:13

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

And as we kind of get going here, the reason I am standing in here today for Pastor Jason, you know, death is never convenient.

Jason had a really busy week this week and was called by a close family friend in Wisconsin and needed to go do a funeral.

And he invited me to stand in for him today, which I was very happy to do.

And, you know, bringing the word of God can be a struggle sometimes.

And I began to ask the Lord what he wanted me to bring.

And I found my heart drawn to an Awana memory verse.

And I thought, how fitting, how fitting.

I actually thought it was the first verse.

It was the second Iwana memory verse for TNT.

And I thought, you know, we are just kicking off a whole year of memory verses, of scripture memory for our youth.

And what a good time to talk a little bit about why it is that we memorize these verses and what good we can make of these verses in the years to come.

There's an awful lot of work that goes into them, and there is a way bigger payoff than a patch or a reward at the end of the year.

And so I'd really like us to kind of highlight that today.

To help me on our way today to read this, I invited, I don't know if I have any takers in this hour, I invited any TNTers.

So if you're in TNT in Iwana and you want to come and uh help me read the verse off the screen, you won't have to do it from memory.

Come on, I had three takers last four actually last hour.

There we go, there's one.

Come on up.

All right.

Sweet, I knew you would do it.

I think she has it in memory, actually, I'm pretty sure.

All right.

Well, yeah, just come on up here.

Oh, that's awesome.

So you guys are memorizing this verse.

You recognize it, right?

Romans 15, 13.

And we'll, I'll try to say it.

You know, keeping the cadence the same can be a little bit of a struggle, but we'll we'll do the best we can, okay?

And if you get lost, it's right up there.

That's where I'll be looking.

All right, you ready?

May the God of all hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.

So that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

Thank you.

The word of the Lord.

Good job, guys.

Well, as we look at this uh really truly great verse, I would like us to think about how we're going to get through this today, and I've kind of broken it up into three main movements.

I want to begin by looking at what is God's heart and vision for us in Christ.

What is God's heart and vision for us in Christ?

Secondly, why is that such good news?

And finally, how does this get realized or activated in our lives?

Those are the three different places we hope to go today.

So let's begin by talking about what is God's heart and vision for us.

Anytime we come to Scripture, I really hope that one of the fundamental questions you have on your heart is what does this verse or this passage tell me about the living God?

We really are meant to ask that as the most basic question of Scripture.

What we know about God, all that we know about God, only comes through Scripture.

We don't have other sources that we can turn to that can tell us things about his person, his character, his promises, what he's doing in the world.

We find that in Scripture, and that is why we make such a big deal about the Bible within Christianity.

Of course, a second question to ask that goes right along with that is what does this verse tell me about myself?

That is, about humanity.

These two observations, really, John Calvin once said, a great theologian said that they really encompass all of the Christian life, knowledge of God and knowledge of self, and they go hand in glove together and should never be separated.

But today we're going to focus a lot on the first one of those questions.

What does this really tell us about God?

And we're not just looking here about what God does, what he does.

We really want to look at who God is, who he is, and what his heart is and his vision is for us.

As we come to the Word and as we come and bring that, please know that none of us come with a kind of dry sponge.

You know, nothing there, we're just gonna sop up whatever we read.

There's not a vacuum there.

We come with preconceived ideas.

We come with ideas about God that we pick up everywhere.

Some good, some not good.

But as a part of our looking at Scripture, a part of what we want to do is depend on the Lord to give us sight, to see what He really is like, who He really is, and to displace what we might have in our heart that runs contrary to that, and it might in fact encourage us in a good direction.

Well, there are three things in this prayer.

That's what this is.

Romans 15, verse 13 is a prayer wish.

Romans 15:13

It's a great prayer.

A good prayer that we could pray for one another and for ourselves.

There are three things in this prayer about the heart and the vision of God for us.

The first thing that he has in here is that God's heart for us is that you and I would have an overflowing, abounding hope.

Not just that we would be hopeful.

I want you to catch this.

His heart for us is that we would be overflowing and have an abounding hope.

And in the English language, when we talk about hope, we often use it in the sense of what we are optimistic about.

For example, today is the last day of the youth deer hunting season, and I hope to be in the woods this afternoon with my daughter, and I hope that we get a deer today.

I'm optimistic about it, but it's in doubt, right?

It's all up in the air.

None of it may happen.

And um, when you come to the scriptures and you see the word hope, it runs in a different direction.

In the scriptures, there is a certainty about the hope that God calls us to have and to enter into because it is grounded in what he has done and what he's promised.

And he's the Lord.

And when he says it's going to happen, it happens.

And when he's done things that have laid the foundation for things to come, they are going to come.

And so we have a great confidence, we have a great foundation to believe in that God is at work in bringing about things for us that can give us a great hope.

So this begs the question then, what is it we're to be hopeful about?

I mean, hope has to have an object.

What should we be hopeful about?

And uh it's interesting, there are a lot of things, a lot of ways that we could answer that.

One pastor that I was reading said, you know, hey, just going to Romans alone would give us a great snapshot of this.

For example, if you went to Romans chapter 5, verse 2, you would find that there we're told that we are going to hope in the glory of God.

Romans 5:2

We have hope that we are going to see and savor the glorious appearing of our Lord.

We're going to see God as He is.

We're going to participate in a full on-site presence relationship with Him that won't be by faith as it is in this world.

If you go to Romans 8, there we're told that we Christians, we hope for a new heaven and a new earth.

The creation itself is going to be set free from its bondage to decay, this spiraling down, the cursing of the ground that we have in the beginning of history that we have participated in and see all around us, we are going to have an entire new planet.

Yes, we're going to, heaven is going to be on earth, on planet earth, a new earth.

A new earth.

Some of you are going to be in North Dakota on that new earth if there is such a place.

It's really going to be glorious, and the scriptures put that out for us to say you can bank on it.

You're going to see God.

You're going to have a whole new environment to live in.

Furthermore, in Romans 8, it goes on to tell us that we're going to have new bodies.

We're going to be resurrected and remade in the process.

Listen to this.

We who have the first fruits of the Holy Spirit, we groan inwardly now as we await.

Oh, as we wait.

It's taking so long.

We wait for the redemption of our bodies.

For in this hope, we were saved.

We're going to have a body that will no longer be capable of sinning, no longer be capable of rebellion, of desiring the wrong things, will no longer be decaying and declining and breaking down.

Doctors will be out of business in the new earth.

And there will be no more death or sorrow or destruction.

These are the kinds of things that God has told us to be hopeful about.

To be hopeful about.

It has the idea of delight and gladness behind it.

But when we think of joy, often we think of just mere pleasure.

And pleasure is something in this life that comes and goes.

In fact, we can't ever sustain pleasure.

No matter how hard you try, you get something that's going to bring you pleasure.

It will fade very quickly, and you will be without it after a short while.

It reminded me of a time when I was much younger, or just after high school, I went into the military.

And I had a time when I was a part of a peacekeeping force over in Beirut, Lebanon.

And it was just horrible over there, and we couldn't wait to get out of there.

The anxiety was through the roof.

And things kept going wrong where we couldn't go.

And it's just the anxiety to leave was building and building.

The troops who were supposed to replace us went off to Grenada.

The day finally came.

We were down on the beach to catch something, to get out to the ship like 10 miles offshore.

And they said, Oh, guess what?

Your transportation got canceled.

Come back again tomorrow and we'll try again, maybe, maybe next week.

We're not sure.

And all I could think of was, I could just want the pleasure of being on that ship.

Then I would be okay.

Sure enough, the day came.

I got on the ship.

You never felt a letdown, you know, just a release of tension was off the charts.

Evening came, I got in my bunk.

I am ready to relax.

We have a month-long journey back to the States.

And um all of a sudden, without warning, the lights go out, the red lights come on, which on a ship means trouble, the general quarters sound starts going, you know, the it gets really tense.

The captain comes on the intercom system and says, man your battle stations, man your battle stations, this is not a drill.

A few minutes later, we hear the cannons going off uh above us, and we are we are deep in this ship.

All the pleasure that I had was washed away in a flash.

I just couldn't believe it.

Like it was so short-lived.

And that is the way it goes in this life.

Whatever your ship is that you can't wait to get on, to get out of the stress.

Oh, maybe it's not battle stations, but stick with that ship long enough, you're gonna be in high seas and you're gonna think you're sinking.

Trust me, you're gonna get sick and you're, you know, you're you something is going to ruin it for you because we live in a fallen world.

But what God's heart for us is not that we would have pleasure that would help us cope with our stress.

He wants us to have joy that's more of a relational term that describes the atmosphere and the pleasure of being intimate friends with him, of enjoying his face shining upon us, no matter what, and in spite of whatever our circumstances are.

Joy.

Joy of being one with the Lord, of being his, of being loved and delighted in by him, of being seen by him, of being cared for by him.

That's what God's heart is, that we would actually be filled with all joy.

Finally, there's one other aspect to this heart of God that's given to us here in this most astounding passage.

That we would be filled with all peace.

That we would have an inner calm and an inner rest that in spite of all of our circumstances, we would know that everything is okay in the universe.

It's okay.

Because the Lord is reigning, and I belong to him as his son or his daughter.

And he is so much moving us in this direction that he's actually even called the God of hope.

Now I want you to look at the just soak this in for a minute here.

You know, you know, we're just kind of like this cup.

You know, we just have a few morsels in the bottom here.

And the language of this prayer is meant to get our attention.

Because the language of this prayer is the language of fullness, of feeling, and filling, and feeling, and feeling, and overflowing.

That's the language of this passage.

It's just water, it's okay.

That's God's heart for us.

That is so different than just barely having enough to hang on.

He wants us to be filled and to be overflowing and to be.

That will overflow into praise to God in all kinds of ways, privately and corporately.

You see, you know we can, you can give praise to God on the outside.

You can.

But having praise come from the heart, from the inside out, you have to have hope.

You have to have peace.

And you have to have joy.

That's what it takes for us to flow in that way.

And this is the heart of God for us.

Now let's shift gears.

Why is that such good news?

Why is that such good news?

I'm kind of an odd duck, and I have spent a lot of time over the years terrorizing myself at various points, thinking about, yeah, I just can't believe God is who he says he is.

I mean that in a good sense.

What if he wasn't?

I mean, none of us have any control over what God's like.

He just is.

What if the God who was was different than the God who is?

You know, maybe there's some philosophical impossibility of that, but that's beyond my pay grade to deal with that.

I'm just I'm just kind of thinking, wow, you know, people turn out to be, a lot of people turn out to be, you know, great for a while, and then they turn out to be very different.

And um doesn't usually go very well in the end.

What if, yeah, what if God was like that?

What if he was untrustworthy?

And what if he didn't tell the truth?

And what if he changed his mind?

And um, he doesn't do that.

He doesn't.

Because he's the God of hope, and he is a God who has revealed himself to be completely other than us.

That's actually the idea behind being holy, completely other than we are morally and in other ways.

Why is it such good news that God's heart for us is moving in this different direction for us, that God wants us to be filled with hope and peace and joy, and that that will bring his heart pleasure.

Why is that such good news?

Well, it's really good news if you understand who the you is in verse 13.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing.

Paul is writing this letter to Christians in Rome, and I think perhaps most of whom were Gentiles.

They were non-Jews.

And when you lived in this day and age, the time of this letter writing, the time of Christ, being a Gentile meant you were an outsider.

That's what it meant.

You were an outsider.

You were far away from the promises of God.

In fact, the Lord says as much in the book of Acts.

He says that in the past, God let the nations go their own way.

And that he revealed himself to Israel.

And he formed this nation.

And from Israel in the future, the word, the gospel about him was to go out to the nations.

But there was a long time when the nations, if they were to be aligned with God, they had to come into the Jewish faith in one way or another.

Just listen to how this is put in another one of Paul's letters in the book of Ephesians.

He says, Therefore remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised by those who call themselves the circumcision, remember that at that time you were separated from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel, and foreigners to the covenants of promise, without hope, and without God in the world.

You were far away.

My word for that is outsiders.

You were outsiders to God, outsiders to Christ, outsiders to the people of God, you were outsiders to the promise of God, the covenants of God.

You were outsiders to hope.

But now, in Christ Jesus, you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace, who has made Jew and Gentile one and has destroyed the barrier.

He came and he preached peace to you who were far away.

That's us, Gentiles.

And peace to you who were near.

For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of his own household.

And in him you are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his spirit.

Wow, from outsider to insider.

Outsider to insider.

Is there any wonder why this is such good news?

Is there any wonder what lies behind the peace and the joy and the hope that we're called to have in the Lord?

He has done this for us through Jesus Christ, who came and lived out the law perfectly and bore the penalty of sin on the law on the um on the cross on our behalf.

We, in fact, were the weary and the heavy laden in this world that Jesus invites to come to him.

And this is phenomenal news that we can come to God as insiders and have hope and joy and peace.

Well, finally, one more movement here.

How does God's heart and vision actually get activated and realized in our lives?

How does that happen?

How do we do that?

I I wrote in my in my notes here stupid third points of sermons.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just kind of hang out with points one and two?

But the reality is, you know, our lives don't quite line up with points one and two in the way we would like them to.

In fact, the very idea that Paul is praying this on behalf of his Christian readers indicates that he's looking for growth in these areas on their part.

In fact, God, we live in a world where God has cursed the ground.

And he's cursed relationship.

And brokenness has just resonated all through the creative order.

And so, as we live in a time when we have these promises in the future, in their fullness, but now in part, we're stuck in this kind of we're in the already, but we're in the not yet zone.

And that is the battle of the Christian life is navigating that zone and navigating it well without going too far in one direction or too far in the other.

And you know how this happens in our lives.

This happens to the most mature among us.

You know it does.

You talk to each other.

I talk to you.

I hear this out of the most mature among us.

My life is unraveling right now.

There's a cycle going on.

Life is just unraveling, unraveling, unraveling.

I'm feeling dogged out again and again.

I'm wondering why my life isn't working the way I thought it would.

I'm wondering at times, where is God?

It feels like he's not always there, like I like he says he will be, and I struggle with that.

And then evil, evil's always involved, but evil begins leveraging, doesn't he?

Satan, our enemy, and his forces, however that works, they began to leverage.

Accusations come.

They began to work inside of us in all kinds of ways to begin to try to sideline us, and with the end result being hope and peace and joy began to fade.

What's strong today may next week be low.

Isn't that true?

It really is true.

In fact, in our reading today, and interesting how God works this out.

Webb had no idea what I was speaking on.

He picked the reading passage in John, which focuses a lot on the Holy Spirit, which we're going to come up to here in a moment.

But in the reading, you notice that Jesus is telling his disciples how it was going to go for them, right?

Did he describe a life of peace and joy and just steadfast hopefulness?

He told them that some of them would be killed.

He said, don't be surprised.

And he even urged them to not fall away.

There's a whole doctrine in scripture about persevering in faith.

Because life doesn't play out the way you might think it does when you get started.

Well, what is the way forward in this between the already and not yet?

It's right in the passage and it's summarized in two really simple phrases.

The first one we hit is down in the first part of verse 13.

In believing, in trusting, in believing, taking God at His Word, taking Him at His Word and acting on it.

But the second, just as important, goes with it.

So that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

Now it's by the power of the Holy Spirit.

First it was by believing.

Now it's by the power needed to hope actually comes from the Spirit of God.

Which is it?

It's actually both.

Both of these go together.

There's a Swiss theologian, a famous one, Francis Schaeffer.

He wrote a book called True Spirituality.

And in this book, he talks about, he kind of coins a phrase, that the Christian life is one of active passivity.

Active passivity.

I love that phrase.

And you can see it right in this verse.

There is a passivity involved, first of all.

It's a passivity that learns what it means to depend upon God.

Hey, as long as we are trying to do something and make something happen, we're not being dependent.

We're really not.

We're leveraging our personality, we're leveraging our position, we're leveraging our strengths and gifts, and we're trying to get what we think we need.

That's not dependence.

Dependence is coming empty-handed.

Dependence is knowing you're a clay pot.

My wife has this beautiful clay pottery pot for plants that she got, and my son put it on the workbench, and I moved a box just two days ago, and it hit the floor and it shattered.

And I picked up a piece of this, and really it just came flooding to me.

We have this treasure in jars of clay.

It just reminded me who I am.

Weakness.

We're all that in Christ.

We have great dignity, but we are weak.

We have clay pots, we live in bodies that are disintegrating.

And we get discouraged easily.

So there's a dependence factor that we have, but there's also a factor of us trusting and clinging to Christ.

How is this actually done practically?

How is this done?

You know, there's some great indications right in the passage to show us how this actually plays out.

First of all, you know this is a prayer.

This is a prayer that Paul is praying, and I believe that the Roman Christians received more hope and more peace and a greater joy because Paul prayed this prayer.

He depended on the Lord and asked him to do something and bless them.

And likewise, that is one of the ways that we receive and activate the power of the Holy Spirit.

We believe and we pray.

We put ourselves before God.

I got nothing, Lord.

But man, I am I am weary and tired of being a Christian who has so little hope and so little joy in this week of that I'm having or in this phase of my life.

And so there's prayer and prayer for one another and prayer for ourselves.

There's also scripture.

Look, if you will, up to verse 4.

Verse 4 says, in the same chapter of Romans 15, for whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope.

How is hope going to be activated in our lives?

As we believe enough to get the scriptures out, or as we believe enough to begin to memorize scripture and recall it from what we've learned and assess those scriptures and put our trust in them.

But then the Holy Spirit is the author of Scripture, and the Spirit wants us to hear what He's written and will encourage us through this channel.

Then look, if you will, in verse 14.

Paul says, I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able to encourage or instruct one another.

This is another way that the Spirit of God empowers, and we activate by this active passivity encouragement, hope, peace, and joy.

We get it from one another.

You become the spirit's agent to build up your brother.

I become the spirit's agent to bring encouragement from his word.

You know how this works.

How many times have you been really low?

And one of your brothers and sisters came along and they offered a word.

Or you heard a word on the radio, or you've you've heard a word in community, and somebody who cared about you gave you a word from the Lord that comes out of Scripture, and you were encouraged and built up, and your hope was bolstered, and your joy was bolstered and renewed, and you began to have a fresh sense of inner peace.

You kind of got realigned to the reality that you belong to the Lord and that he hasn't forgotten about you.

You see this play out in scripture a lot.

Isaiah 40, listen to these words.

Why do you complain, Jacob?

Why do you say, Israel, my way is hidden from the Lord, my cause is disregarded by my God.

Don't you know?

Haven't you heard?

The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth.

He doesn't grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.

He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.

Even youth grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall.

But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

That is a beautiful picture of the cycle of being in the already and not yet.

Of being in a place of my way is hidden from the Lord, to being in a place of yes.

I hear you, Lord.

I hear you.

You do give strength to the weary, you do increase our weakness.

Praise be to the Lord.

Well, as we come finally to a conclusion here.

All of this means that we have to learn to be a people who fight for joy, who fight for hope, who fight for peace.

It's not going to come to us in our sleep.

It's not going to just kind of trickle down from on high in a way that we're not actively involved in it.

That's a part of what a component of maturity is learning how to recognize when you are down, knowing where to go, to fight for hope and joy and strength, and to fight to get back to where you need to be, to lean upon the Lord, to turn to the scriptures, to turn to one another, and to be renewed and strengthened.

So, what is the role this year in Iwana of memorizing?

You parents, you memorize them too, don't we?

As you go through all these verses with your children, what is the role of these verses in our life?

Well, one of the great roles that I hope, may it be so, that these verses have in your lives and the lives of your children is that they will remind you of who you are and who the Lord is and his great heart for you, and to fight when that is low.

Fight and not be passive, but be active, passive.

Let's close in prayer.

Lord God, we thank you for uh these great words that reveal your heart for us, and it seems too good to be true that the living God who is wants such good and profoundly rich things for us.

It seems too good to be true that we would be included of all the people on the face of the earth, so many who will not ever come to you, and yet you've initiated great things in our own heart and have brought us to see and have sight, and you've made us your sons and daughters in Christ.

So, Lord, we ask that you would bless these to our life, and uh that they would, in fact, lead us to a deeper worship.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.