07-03-11 A Reason For Doing

We return this morning

to our study of Romans chapter 12.

Romans chapter 12 begins the 4^th and final major section of the book of Romans.

If you are new to this book,

or don’t know a whole lot about it,

it will help you to know that, although we call it a “book”,

it was really a very long letter

written by the Apostle Paul

to the Christians who were living in Rome.

He wrote the letter

for the purpose of giving those Christians

an understanding of the basic truths

that form the heart of the Christian message.

Paul accomplished that goal so well

that, almost since its writing,

his letter, or copies of it,

were passed on from Christian to Christian,

and from church to church

until very quickly it became

the most significant single, unified statement of Christian truth ever written.

When the early church leaders

selected and pulled together those first century documents

that were universally accepted

as being uniquely inspired by God,

the documents that we now recognize as the New Testament,

the book of Romans was placed

as the first in the collection of doctrinal letters

because of its premier statement of the Christian message.

As we’ve moved through our study of this letter,

we have seen Paul provide us

with the answers to 4 major questions.

1. Why was Christ needed?

Why was it necessary for our Creator God

to take on human form,

live among us, His creation,

and allow us to nail Him to a cross?

In that section

he drew for us

a terrifying picture of the human race

without Christ.

He showed us that, left to our own efforts to be good

and do good,

in an attempt to make ourselves pleasing to God,

we have no hope whatsoever.

We all end up standing guilty before God

and justifiably condemned by Him.

2. From there, Paul went on to explain

what it means to live with God

on the basis of faith in Jesus Christ.

In simple terms

He told us that through His death on the Cross

Christ was offering Himself

as payment for the sins of the whole world,

and all He asks from us

in order to share in that payment,

in order for us to have our sins

literally placed onto Christ,

is our recognition that we really do need Him as our Savior,

and our choosing to believe that Christ really did die in our place for our sins.

It is in this section of Romans that Paul says,

ROM 3:28 For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.

It is in that same section of the letter

that Paul gives

what I believe to be

the most hope-filled single statement

ever spoken to the human race.

ROM 5:1 Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,

ROM 5:2 through whom also we have obtained our introduction by faith into this grace in which we stand...

Peace with God

and this grace in which we stand.

When those two truths

begin to possess the human spirit,

for the first time we begin to see our God as He really is -

the God who loves us with an everlasting love,

the God who eagerly seeks us,

drawing us to Himself from the day we are born,

the God who chose to die in our place for our sins

just so that He could provide a way for us to be reunited with Him in love forever.

3. The third section of Paul’s letter to the Romans

was then written by him

to explain to us the relationship between the Nation of Israel

and The Church.

4. And then finally, beginning with chapter 12,

Paul reveals to his readers

the six principles that govern life within the Church.

We are currently studying

the 2^nd of those six principles.

This 2^nd principle is given to us

in Romans 12:3-21.

This 19 verse section

presents the guidelines

for the proper use of spiritual gifts within the Body of Christ.

There are some things happening in this passage

that, if correctly understood,

will impact our lives as profoundly as any other truth in Scripture.

During the past 40 years

I have heard more approaches to teaching on spiritual gifts than I could count.

And more than a few of those approaches

seemed to present our relationship to the gifts

almost as a religious duty or obligation

that we are called upon to fulfill

in order for us to live an effective Christian life.

When we began this study last week

I told you that spiritual gifts

are not gifts that God gives to us,

but rather they are gifts that God gives through us to our fellow Christians.

They are our contribution to the party,

our offering to our fellow Christians.

Now, that is true,

and I’m certainly not retracting that statement,

but if we just stop there in our thinking

that truth alone will still leave us a half a bubble off.

And for this to make any sense

I need to begin by reminding us once again

of one of Satan’s most effective strategies

for robbing the Christian

of the kind of power and fulfillment God designed for us to know.

The strategy is this -

He takes the gifts God has given to us

and attempts to turn them into duties or obligations

that we think we must give back to God.

In the past when I’ve talked about this principle

I’ve presented it in the context

of things like the Bible, and prayer, and the Church.

Through the Bible

God has given to the human race

everything we will ever need to know

in order to experience the most deeply fulfilling life we could ever have.

It is an incredible gift to us from our God.

The Psalmist describes it as “PSA 119:105 ...a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

When Ezekiel described his relationship to the written Word,

he said, EZEKIEL 3:3 ...“Then I ate it, and it was sweet as honey in my mouth.”

And whenever we see it correctly,

it will affect us exactly the same way.

And through it our God provides for us

the pathway to a transformed life.

So how does Satan counter the power of the Written Word in our lives?

By taking this incredible gift from our God

and turning it into a religious duty

that we believe we must fulfill

in order to please God.

“Have you read your Bible today?

All good Christians read their Bible’s every day.

If you read your Bible every day God will be pleased with you.”

And once that mentality is in place,

one of the most incredible gifts ever given to man by God

is reduced to sterile little religious duty

in which we feel pleased with ourselves if we’ve done it,

and guilty if we have not.

We’ve talked about this tactic of Satan’s before,

but until recently

I never realized the degree to which

we are vulnerable to the same type of trap

when it comes to our relationship to the teaching on the gifts.

If we are not careful

it is very easy for the New Testament teaching on the gifts

to be twisted into some sort of system in which everyone is trying to figure out

exactly which gift they have so they can hang a label on it,

and in the end some people feel good because they have,

and others feel bad, or frustrated, or excluded because they haven’t,

and when it’s all said and done

it has not really altered our lives at all

because we have missed the very heart

of what our God is doing for us

in this whole area of spiritual gifts.

OK, we’ll come back to this in a few minutes,

but I first want to lead us through

a very brief overview of these 19 verses in Romans 12

so that we’ve got a grasp

on what Paul is saying.

Romans 12:3-21 breaks down into 4 distinct sections.

1. The first is 12:3-6.

In this section Paul uses an analogy

to describe for us

the way the gifts are designed by God to operate within the Body of Christ.

He says,

ROM 12:3 For through the grace given to me I say to every man among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.

ROM 12:4 For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function,

ROM 12:5 so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

ROM 12:6 And since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let each exercise them accordingly:

He compares the Body of Christ, the Church,

to our own physical body.

He knows this is something we will all easily understand.

He reminds us that our bodies

are made up of a whole bunch of distinct parts -

our hands, our feet, our eyes, and ears, and nose, and mouth, and heart, and so forth.

Each has a special and important role,

but none can function well without the others.

Then he tells us

we have the same type of relationship with one another within the family of God.

God has equipped each one of us

to serve our own unique role

in His expression of Himself to the world through us.

All of us are needed,

and all of us are dependant upon one another.

2. Then, in the last phrase of 12:6 and the first phrase of 12:7

Paul tells us that the role assigned to each of us

will fall into one of two broad categories -

either speaking or serving.

ROM 12:6-7 ... if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving...

It will help you to know

that the word “prophecy” used by Paul in that verse

means simply, “to speak forth”.

He is telling us

that God equips each of us

to operate in one or the other

of these two broad arenas -

either speaking

or service.

We could spend the rest of the morning

tracing this concept through the New Testament,

but I’ll just give you a few more references

and let you do the research on your own if it interests you.

In Ephesians 4:11-12

Pau lists all of the speaking gifts

and then tells us

that those with the speaking roles

are suppose to equip those with the serving gifts

for the work God has for them to do.

If you’re interested,

Peter talks about exactly the same two speaking/serving divisions

in 1 Peter 4:10-11.

3. After revealing to us the two broad arenas in which our gifts equip us to operate - speaking and serving -

Paul then reveals to us the 5 motivational gifts distributed throughout the body of Christ by the Spirit of God.

He says,

ROM 12:7 ... he who teaches, in his teaching;

ROM 12:8 or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.

teaching,

exhortation,

giving,

leading,

mercy

And in just a few words

let me tell you what I believe is going on with these 5 categories.

You may have noticed that I called them “5 motivational gifts”.

I believe these 5 gifts are not things we do,

but rather they are 5 distinct inner motivations created within us by the Holy Spirit,

motivations that provide us with the reason we need

for doing all the ongoing things God gives us to do.

Now, at one point in my preparation for this morning

I planned to work through detailed definitions of these 5 gifts.

But after doing that, every time I read over them,

I came away feeling as though

the process of doing that

actually ended up taking us farther away from the central message being offered to us here by our Lord.

So let me just state it this way.

One of the many remarkable things

that God accomplishes within us

when we place our lives into His hands

is His creating within us

a whole new reason for doing

so many of the things that we do in life.

I hope most of us have retained some memory of what our lives were really like

prior to our union with Jesus Christ.

Those memories can be of tremendous value

especially at those times

when we begin to feel as though nothing has really changed much in our lives.

You see, the truth is,

without Christ within us,

we, like everyone else in the world,

are absolutely and utterly SELF centered.

The care, protection, preservation,

elevation, success, and ultimate happiness of ourselves

is our bottom line to life.

Even when we get into those raging emotional storms

that, in our culture we call “love”,

it is not about the other person,

it’s all about us -

it’s about us getting our love needs

met by and through the other person.

I came to Christ when I was 19 years old.

When I graduated from high school at age 17

I had the photographer who did my senior pictures

make up what was, at the time,

the largest size portrait available of one of my senior pictures,

not for my parents,

or for my grandparents,

but for ME.

I wanted this HUGE picture of myself for myself.

I know most of us aren’t quite so blatant in our expressions of our self-centeredness,

but the only difference between me and you

is that I was just a little more honest -

outside of Christ we are the center of our own world,

and everything we do we do ultimately for ourselves.

But when we come to Christ,

and we remove ourselves from that GOD position in our own lives,

and place our Lord in that position instead,

part of His reconstructive work within us

involves His creating within us

new reasons for doing the things we do.

He begins to teach us how to love...

REALLY love one another.

And part of that process concerns these 5 motivational gifts

mentioned here in Romans.

You see, at their heart,

these motivational gifts are God giving each of us

the ability to see very real needs

in the lives of the people around us

and a longing to reach out and meet those needs.

Teaching

Exhortation

Giving

Leading

Mercy

Some of you will be filled with an awareness

of how God’s truth could transform the lives of those around you,

and long to share that truth with them.

That is the motivational gift of teaching.

Some of you will be filled with a longing

to encourage those in your world

to trust God more,

to truly trust His heart of love for them.

That is the motivational gift of exhortation.

Some of you will see God giving you resources beyond what you need,

and find yourself filled with an eager desire to reach out and meet the needs of others through what God has placed under your stewardship.

That is the motivational gift of giving.

Some of you will see so clearly

how your fellow Christians

could more effectively coordinate their lives and their resources,

and long to reach out and help them to do so.

That is the motivational gift of leading.

And some of you will discover your God giving you the ability

to feel the pain,

or the fear,

or the frustration,

or the confusion going on in those around you,

filling you with a longing

to reach out and help and heal.

That is the motivational gift of mercy.

And just as a parenthesis here,

there is no direct correlation between the motivational gift given to us by our Lord

and the specific work or activities He gives us to do.

Because I stand up here every week and perform the activity or ministry of teaching

you might assume that I have the motivational gift of teaching.

But I don’t.

My own personal motivational gift is mercy.

Teaching is simply a tool God has given me

with which I attempt to help with the turmoil I sense so strongly in my fellow Christians.

But whether you can put a name or a label to those God-created desires within you or not doesn’t matter.

What does matter is our responsiveness

to this remarkable recreative work of God within us.

Because, you see,

it is that responsiveness

that will provide each of us

with our own personal doorway

into some of the deepest fulfillment we will ever know in life.

It is remarkable, isn’t it,

that when we held ourselves at the center of our own lives,

doing everything we did just for ourselves,

for our own gratification,

for our own fulfillment,

for our own happiness,

for our own glorification,

we were never happy!

But, as God begins to free us from ourselves,

creating within us longings

to reach out and help the lives of those around us,

as we pour ourselves into the lives of others,

we find the fulfillment we could never find when we were looking only at ourselves.

I could have said all of this far more simply, of course,

by borrowing the words our King.

JOH 13:35 "By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."

These spiritual gifts are, at their core,

simply God giving each of us

the inner motivation to love.

Then, in the remaining 13 verses of this section of Romans, verses 9-21,

Paul offers a number of practical instructions

for the use of these motivational gifts.

I’ll do nothing more with the remainder of this passage

than simply to read it for us as the conclusion to our time together.

But I would encourage you

to go back over it on your own

and look more closely

at the guidelines Paul gives us

for the use of these gifts.

ROM 12:9-21 Let love be without hypocrisy. Abhor what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor; not lagging behind in diligence, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope, persevering in tribulation, devoted to prayer, contributing to the needs of the saints, practicing hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and curse not. Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. Be of the same mind toward one another; do not be haughty in mind, but associate with the lowly. Do not be wise in your own estimation. Never pay back evil for evil to anyone. Respect what is right in the sight of all men. If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, "Vengeance is Mine, I will repay," says the Lord. "But if your enemy is hungry, feed him, and if he is thirsty, give him a drink; for in so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.