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Part 4 of 7
The Believer's Constitution
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We are a real church with real people and real problems pursuing a real God. We haven't figured everything out, and we recognize we're not for everybody—but we are for somebody. If you're a Christian joining us, we pray you left your former church well. If you didn't, we'd rather not hear about it; we love other churches and we're all doing our best.
If you're not yet a Christian, we're honored you're here and that you're leaning into this conversation. This past week, a professor at a state school sent me a message saying one of his students who attends our church sent him an email: "My pastor just gave a sermon that disagrees with what you're teaching." The professor watched our last three messages and said he was intrigued. That's a win to us. We pray that if anything, you find yourself intrigued and willing to continue listening.
We jumped into a series on the book of Romans—also called The Believer's Constitution—which answers the fundamental question: How do we get right with God? That question is itself a confession; it acknowledges that we're wrong with God and need to reconcile this relationship.
Today we're in Romans 2:17–29. It's important that we stay with Paul's logical train of thought so you understand his argument. It's easy to get distracted by buzzwords in the text, but staying with Paul is key.
Paul was once an adversary to the church who hated followers of Christ. Then he became a leader of followers of Christ—a renegade for the gospel. If you hate Christianity or have strong thoughts about it, you're going to love Paul.
Paul is writing to the Roman Empire—the center of the known world. This is a bold attempt to knock on the door of culture and society's greatest influence. More specifically, he's addressing a church within that context.
When you read Romans, you must read it as a debate. Paul is engaging with the thinking of the day—the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno (the father of Stoicism) and other Stoics. These paradigms shaped how people viewed the world, understood meaning, and approached logic and reasoning. Their influence still shapes the Western world today.
Paul has a righteous stubbornness. It reminds me of the book of Ezekiel, where God tells the prophet: "I'm sending you to a wicked people who are hard-headed. Therefore, I'm going to give you a forehead of Flint." God was making the prophet even more stubborn with righteous conviction. Paul steps into a context where everyone is proud of their logic, their reasoning, their belief system, and he says: "Let's put all the cards on the table. I'm not socially embarrassed about this, and I'm not intellectually embarrassed about this."
The Roman church was divided between Jews and Gentiles. Why? Emperor Claudius had kicked all the Jews out of Rome, but before that, they had started a church there and spread the gospel. When Claudius left power and Emperor Nero took over, Nero allowed the Jews to return to Rome. They came back to discover their church still existed—and was thriving entirely with Gentile believers.
There was a different culture, different customs, different traditions. Now Jewish believers return and discovered tension between them and the Gentile believers. Paul is addressing both this divided church and the Roman Empire itself, drawing everyone's attention to the gospel.
Paul summarizes the gospel in two words: Grace and peace. Peace is where we're going; grace is how we get there. Grace is the vehicle; peace is the destination. These words are critical, and their order matters. Paul says: "I'm going to tell you this good news, and I am unashamed of it. There is an abundance of grace provided to us through Jesus Christ, and it leads us into a peace that surpasses understanding." This is a multifaceted, multi-layered peace—peace with God, peace with your coworkers, peace of heart and mind. It is a robust idea of peace.
Paul builds his argument from easiest to hardest—like walking into a debate in the living room by going for the layup before attempting a half-court shot. He identifies three categories of humanity:
Paul is engaging with philosophers and Stoics who all agreed that you and I should live in unison and agreement with creation. The foundation of morality is what we call natural law—embedded in humanity is a conscience and moral awareness that some things are right and some things are wrong.
Paul appeals to these great minds: "On this first point, you agree with me, Plato. You agree with me, Socrates. We should live in agreement with creation and natural law. Well, consider one step further: if we all agree there's a natural law, isn't it much of a leap for us to consider a lawgiver? Isn't it reasonable to say that behind all of this is someone brilliant?"
There are people who participate in natural law every single day—they participate in the grand design of creation. They wake up and go to bed based on creation's timeline and cycle. They function based on cycles and systems hardwired into our world. Every single day they're engaging in it. The moment you step out of this participation, things get wobbly.
Yet some will arrive at a place and say: "I just don't believe there's a God." But consider what you lose: without God, you have no case for a moral lawgiver, no case for right and wrong, no ethics or values, no truth or reasoning. You lose meaning, purpose, transcendence, and eternity.
The moralist says: "We've got this fully figured out. We are living with values and morals. We don't need God." Paul's response: "There's your problem. You are disillusioned by your own goodness."
Scripture says our own righteousness is "but filthy rags in comparison to God." Paul is saying you are a law unto yourselves. Every time you make a judgment call, every time you delineate something between right and wrong, every time you stand on what you believe to be true, you are a law unto yourself. You may not have had the Torah; you weren't raised in the temple; you weren't given the heritage of faith. But you live every single day establishing a standard of right and wrong.
Paul says: "And you, too, are going to get everything you deserve, everything you've earned, everything you've wanted." We don't hear this as good news because beneath the veneer and the mask, deep down inside, we know we don't live up to our own standards. If God is going to give us everything we've earned and deserved, we won't be okay with the outcome.
Now Paul takes a wrecking ball to the religious way of thinking. If you're here thinking "I don't like religion," you're going to love Paul.
He addresses those who call themselves Jews and rely on the law and brag about their relationship to God. They know God's will and approve what is superior because they are instructed by the law. They are convinced they are a guide for the blind, a light for those in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants. They have the law—the embodiment of knowledge and truth.
"You then who teach others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? You who say that people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? You who brag about the law, do you dishonor God by breaking the law? For God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."
Paul is writing to a church, to religious people, and saying: Society and culture are mocking and scorning God because of something you're doing.
This is a haymaker to the jaw. Have you ever looked at someone living out their faith doing something bizarre and unproductive—a misrepresentation of God—and thought: "People are unnecessarily scorning and mocking our God because of what you're doing"? The hardest place to see it is in the mirror.
This week I've seen Christians—whether Republican or Democrat, black, white, or brown—take to Facebook and do this, and I thought: "Lord, help them see it in the mirror."
Paul identifies three areas where the religious are wrong:
The Jewish community had the right background, the right book, and the right business. Consider their background: these people weren't raised in the Torah; they weren't raised in the temple. The Gentiles are new believers. But the Jewish community? They were set up from day one.
They are descendants of Abraham. They had the law from Moses. They were raised in an education system centered entirely on God's text. By ages seven to ten, Jewish children had the entire Torah—the first five books of the Bible—completely memorized. They were set up from the very beginning. They had the Torah, the prophets, this remarkable legacy, the Ten Commandments, the exodus and liberation from Egypt, the Red Sea experience, the Mount Sinai experience.
They had the right book. They possessed this written code, this text that no one else had. And they had the right business: to be a guide for the blind, a light in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants. God called them to live on mission as a representation of God in the world. The promise made to Abraham was that the Jewish people would be a blessing to all people.
But here's what we all need to consider: We Christians love to look down on these groups and don't take into consideration the background we were blessed to come up in. For example, say you rate yourself spiritually as an eight out of ten, and there's someone else in your life who is a seven out of ten. The fact that you're one ring above them gasses you up and leads to prideful ego. But Paul says: "You're an eight, but you started at a seven. The person you're looking down on is a seven, but they started at a two. Who are you looking down on? The person who's made tremendous strides in their faith?"
You were blessed with wonderful parents, blessed to be raised in church, blessed to be sent to a private school, blessed to be under mentorship and guidance your entire life. By osmosis, you were trained in the things of God. So you should know better.
You have the right background, the right book, and the right business—but Paul says: "Where are you in the wrong?" They are wrong in three areas: practice, prominence, and perspective.
First, practice: "You don't practice what you preach."
This is why culture is scorning, mocking, and ridiculing the faith. Just as Christ saw the hypocrisy, culture sees it too. It's the thing none of us want to talk about. I don't want to acknowledge my shortcomings and inconsistency as a follower of Christ, just as much as you don't want to acknowledge yours.
But Paul is saying there's a tendency when you drift into a mechanical approach to your spirituality. You reduce it to a religious system that eventually becomes hollow and empty. Your behaviors don't align with your beliefs. You're not practicing what you preach. Are we practicing what we preach?
Second, prominence: "You're wrong in terms of your prominence."
What Paul is doing is creating level ground at the foot of the cross. Right now we come to the cross with a hierarchy in our mind: the indifferent, the moral, and then us—the religious. Paul comes in and knocks the whole thing out. He says: "No. You're all on level ground at the foot of the cross."
God gave the Jewish people the mission to showcase His glory, His prominence—not theirs, not so they could be the center of attention, but so that God could be exalted and lifted up. But we're so performance-oriented in our thinking. We find much of our identity, our worth, in our performance. We drift toward religion because it's very performance-based.
Here's an exercise for your life group or family: Take a piece of paper and draw six boxes. Go around and draw stick-figure portraits in those six boxes and tell your life story in six images. Then do it again—six images that tell your life story, but you can't use a single accomplishment. Watch how the identity in the room gets shaky. Who am I and what is my story outside of my accomplishments?
We find a lot of identity there, so we fall into performance, prominence, measuring up, comparison. Paul says: "Where you're wrong is you're comparing yourself to this person. All of us should be comparing ourselves to this person"—God—"and then we all realize there's a chasm between all of us and God. Level ground."
Third, perspective: "Your perspective is off."
That's where Paul talks about circumcision. He says: "You are one outwardly, but you're not one inwardly. In other words, you have a hollow faith."
"A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly. Nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly, and circumcision is circumcision of the heart by the spirit, not by the written code. Such a man's praise is not from men, but from God."
I was reading an article about King Tut's coffin. As they opened it, they found a big gold-plated coffin. So they opened it up, and inside the gold-plated coffin was another gold-plated coffin. They opened that up...
and that's the starting point of our faith journey. Now some of us come into this in different ways. Some of you were raised in a godly home and almost by osmosis you were primed to be an early adopter of the faith. Some people come to the faith by nature and creation—they look out at the world, at the mountains and the oceans and the stars and the sky, and think to themselves, "Wow, there has to be an amazing maker." That was their first recognition of God.
Some people come into a recognition of God through a life crisis. You go through a divorce, you walk out of an abusive relationship, you lose your job, you get a terminally ill medical report. Your world is turned upside down. You're confused, isolated, lonely, and brokenhearted. You don't know where to go or who to turn to. A lot of people show up to church looking for an option, and in a space like this—in a crisis—people discover: "Wait a second, this God truly does draw near to the brokenhearted. This God is always up to something even when we're down to nothing. This God is redemptive and works all things together for good. This God extends mercy and peace, and his mercies are new every morning."
You start to trace God's work in your life, and there comes a recognition of God. You showed up here at rock bottom and discovered he is the rock at the bottom, and you can stand upon him in your life.
From there you go into the discipline of discipleship. For a season, you're learning and being taught. You are a student—and life is just better for all of us when we think like beginners rather than experts. Other people are teaching you: "This is what it means to be a Christian. This is the lifestyle, the values, the behaviors. This is what we identify ourselves with. Here's how we function as followers of Christ."
There's a discipleship learning student season.
Jesus not only makes life better; he makes you better at life. If we were to wake up tomorrow and discover conclusively that God does not exist and all this was nonsense, at this point I would still subscribe to the Christian life. In my experience, I have found that Christianity is:
It's just the best approach.
You step into a season where you start to taste, see, and witness the productivity of God's work in your life. But here comes the challenge: most people stop here. They keep all that God is doing on the surface of their life. Remember, we're drawn towards performance. We have this productivity in our life, and we think that is sufficient.
Paul's saying no. At some point it has to move inward. It has to be integrated into your life. It has to go beneath the surface.
If you read The Critical Journey, they've captured the thoughts of two individuals who deconstructed their faith, and they identify what they call the wall—the breakdown between stages four and five. Most people break down before they break through.
As they are beginning to integrate this into their life, something happens: their theology comes face to face with their psychology. "I came into the faith because I saw the sunset and was moved by the idea of God. I came into the faith because those I trusted were wise and responsible with my life. I came into the faith because I went through a crisis and God's tender mercy sustained me. But now as I begin to internalize this, I'm having a hard time reconciling my theology with my psychology. I have some questions."
Paul is making the argument: Yeah, you shouldn't be afraid of your questions. Don't take the bait of culture and assume that just because you have an unanswered question, there's no answer. Paul's saying there is a sturdiness to this faith that you can lean heavily, narrowly, and pointedly into. You will discover: "Wait a second, this is stronger than I thought."
His whole argument is that it's based on truth. The more you get into this, the more valid you're going to discover the truth to be.
It makes me think of the final days of Jesus's life. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." I believe Jesus is the source of all logic, reasoning, wisdom, and truth.
We tend to think this is the first time in human history that truth has stood on trial. But truth has always stood on trial. In fact, Jesus in his final days went through three religious trials, three civil trials, a popular vote, and the scorning at the cross.
He's arrested and dragged to the home of Annas, the former high priest. Annas can't find any fault with the truth. They drag him out of Annas's home and take him to Caiaphas, the current high priest. Once more, Caiaphas can't find any fault with the truth.
What I love about it is that Caiaphas actually breaks seven laws while persecuting Christ. In that moment, Christ is breaking the burden of the law upon the people of God.
What's also brilliant: the priest had a practice during Passover where they would all lay hands on the sacrifice to bless it. There at Caiaphas's home, the religious priests got together and they all punched and smacked and hit Jesus. In a way they couldn't see, God still had them blessing the sacrifice. It's so cool.
They can't find any fault with the truth, so they place him in front of the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin again can't find guilt until someone cries out: "He said he's the Messiah! He said he's the one who was to come, who was to fulfill our law and our prophets—everything God has promised!" They are furious and say, "There it is. He's deserving of death."
Literally, the ones who were teaching people to anticipate the arrival of the Messiah are standing in front of the Messiah, and he's like, "Yeah, I'm him." They can't even see it. Religion can be blinding.
They turn him over to Pontius Pilate, king of Judea. He goes through three more trials. Pontius Pilate gets to a point where he's like, "Well, let's just let the public decide. We'll give him a 50/50 chance. Can't find anything wrong with the guy. Would you want us to release this criminal Barabbas, or would you want us to release this rabbi Jesus?" They say, "Give us Barabbas. Crucify Jesus."
Jesus is led to the cross. He lays down his life for you and me. It's the atoning sacrifice—that is amazing.
What I love is that at the end of these trials, there is a verdict given at the cross. In Matthew 27:24, when the centurion and those with him were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified and exclaimed: "Surely this was the Son of God."
We have been trying truth this entire time. Here we stand at rock bottom. We have gotten to the root of the argument, and we're discovering he's true. Truly, this was the Son of God.
If you're not a Christian, dive into your faith. Dive into this Jesus of ours. I promise you—some were taught that you can't ask hard questions in church because it's viewed as rebellion. The problem is we don't know how to help facilitate a faith crisis. People hit this wall, and they don't know what to do. In a season where they have questions and they're doubting and they're trying to reconcile their psychology with their theology, the church for years has pushed those people outside the community because we're intimidated by the conversation.
Paul's like: Yeah, there's no reason to be intimidated. You won't find a single individual in scripture who didn't go through a faith crisis. We as a church will end up a shallow kiddie pool if we don't learn to help navigate and facilitate faith crises for other people.
You hit this wall and you discover: "Wait a second. There's logic and truth and reasoning and rationale and brilliance behind this life with Christ. He's my only option."
That's the thing: Paul comes to these three groups and says, "All three of you—the one thing that you have in common is Jesus is your only option. That's what I would bet my life on. That's a die-for belief for me. I don't have many—less than ten—that's a die-for belief. Jesus is your only option."
He completely levels the playing field for a community of people that is divided.
I just wonder how God might quicken us where we are falling into the religious treadmill of going through the motions and operating beneath the veneer. We need to begin integrating our faith. Once we break through this wall, suddenly it starts to pour out of our life in a genuine, authentic, nonforced, effortless way. That's how God does it—from the inside out, in you and through you.
Folks, I was disappointed this last week by things I seen online from individuals who call themselves followers of Christ, just not representing our God well and creating hurt and pain from all sides within our church. My prayer is that despite the times we live in and the things we're facing, we live anchored to the cross, anchored to the good news of Jesus Christ, recognizing we're all on level playing field pursuing this Christ.
