God's Provision and Peace in Church Conflict

Chapter in the book of Romans. Some of you probably thought you'd never live this long, but we're at the end of the book of Romans. Chapter 16, if you'd turn there. I want to start reading at verse 20, but verse 20 is sort of a, I don't know, a transition verse. Maybe you might say to it, it's sort of a transition verse. It's a kind of a conclusion to the verses that preceded verse 17 and through 19. Paul here is greeting, sends his greetings, and then he takes a small place, which is unusual for him, for talking about what God is doing in the minds of this church. So this passage, really, I want to talk about it in terms of how God helps us as we're doing the work that he gives us to do. He's talking to this church and saying, be careful because there are people who are coming that will cause division in your church. They'll bring obstacles to you. Anybody who's been in church knows that division and obstacles are part of what goes on, because people oftentimes are torn apart from each other and they're not willing to cooperate with one another. So be careful with that. He said they're contrary to the teachings you've learned. He means from him. Keep away from them. Such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. In other words, they're driven not by Christ or the Holy Spirit, but they're driven by their own passions and desires. So they're self-focused instead of God-focused. And whenever you have this in a congregation, it's really distressing. You see people at odds with each other. You see people who are wanting things because of their own personal interest. They don't have the kingdom of God at stake. And it's very difficult when people are not controlled by the Holy Spirit, but controlled by flesh. It's very hard for them to see anything different because the Holy Spirit is not in them. It's not driving them. And they're using smooth talk and flattery to deceive the minds of naive people. Everyone has heard about your obedience, he said, how faithful you are. So I'm full of joy over you, but I want you to be wise about what is good and innocent about what is evil. And then he ends with verse 20, which he talks about God's remedy for the problems that come in a church. The God of peace, the conflict, you know, where you have conflict in a church. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. What a simple sentence that is to such complex problems. He makes a promise to us in the church. If there is conflict between people in the church, if people are at odds with each other and they don't know exactly what to do and there's no common ground, and they're stirring up trouble, they're mad at each other, they're upset about one thing or another, you can fight about it if you want to, but it's not what God asks for us. Paul's remedy is very simple. If there are people doing this in the congregation, you tend to your business, you do what you're supposed to do, and God will take care of it. His language is graphic and powerful. The God of peace, and when you think of the God of peace, you think somebody doesn't fight. He's talking about the God who brings peace. How can he have peace in the middle of all kinds of turmoil? Oftentimes, whenever there's turmoil in the congregation, people don't like this, they don't like that, they're mad about this, they're mad about that. They don't like the Sunday school, they don't like the literature, they don't like the songs, they don't like the preaching. They have all these things that they don't like. The great temptation is to try to fight and argue about these things, but he tells us that peace doesn't come as a result of our fighting each other and trying to win. The church is God's. It's his responsibility to take care of it, and he brings peace by crushing those that are against him. This is a very difficult thing to do, because in the middle of conflict, where there are people who are snipping and talking and making all kinds of distress, you have problems that seem like they're overwhelming. But if you tend to your business, and you do exactly what you're supposed to do, and you don't get aroused by the people that are fighting, or saying nasty things, or mean things about you, or negative things around you, if you just let that go, God will take care of it. He's the God of peace, and yet he's described here in a very powerful way. He will crush them under his feet. Now, he doesn't ask us to do that. You know, this is a wonderful thing about our faith. I think in the early days of the Middle Ages, whenever the Christians thought that it was their responsibility to get a group of people together and go out and fight wars, they misunderstood all of this. Now we look around the world, and we see so many religions that are really warriors. And they think that the only way to advance their religion is by military power or by force. And they protect and defend their gods by killing the people who might say anything bad about them. See, the God of the Bible is really quite different. He says, take it easy. You don't have to fight. I'll do the fighting. And when it's over, I'll have them crushed under my heel. Just pay attention to what I want you to do. Do the work of the church, and I will take care of anyone who tries to stand in its way. So we don't have to be concerned about the people around the world who are angry with Christians. We don't have to be concerned in our own country with people who are anti-religious or anti-God or they're atheists or whatever they are. We don't have to be worried about them. They're not fighting us. They're fighting God. And you know what? He's capable of taking anyone on. He's never lost a battle in the history of the world. Now, our temptation is, whenever we see these things taking place, is to try to rise to the occasion and straighten people out. But God takes care of that. He just warned them about all these things that were going to take place and stay away from the people who are doing this trouble. But he stops it by saying, in the end, it's really not your battle. Stay away from the fight. Do what you're supposed to be doing, for the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. And he's behind all the things that come in terms of turmoil and division. So he's giving a word of comfort. How does the work of God proceed? It's by the power of God. How does the work of God proceed even when Satan is powerful and forceful among his people? It succeeds because God has the power to crush whatever opponents of his there are out there. Now, Paul turns to his own ministry. He starts giving us a reflection of how his own work has been encouraged and supported by God. Verse 21, he says, Timothy, my fellow worker, sends his greetings to you, as do Lucius, Jason, and Sosipater, my relatives. And when he uses the word relatives, Paul is generally referring not to his blood relatives in terms of family line, but he's talking about his spiritual relatives, which is a reference to the Jews. He's talking about these last people being Jews. Now, some people think we don't know any of these people, really. Sometimes names like that are mentioned in the Bible, but we don't know. They don't have last names, so we don't always know exactly who they are. But Paul lets us know that God has been giving him help. And that's another very powerful thing we see. Not only does God take care of the conflicts that come up to try to stop the church, but he gives us the workers that we need. And sometimes we're frustrated by the fact that we don't have enough workers right now to do the things we need to do. Paul had a job of being a missionary, and he had no book because no one had written a book about how to be a missionary. He had no training where he could go to school and learn how to be a missionary. He was just in a meeting like this one day in the church, and they were praying about all the lost world. And the Holy Spirit said to these people, Man, I tell you, you ought to send Paul out to go preach to those places out there. And they said, That's a good idea. And they laid their hands on him, prayed for him, and said, Go do it. That's all he had. What do I mean by that? That's all he had. He had God. He had God guiding him. What more would you need? He was so close to God and so open to God that whatever God wanted him to do, he did it. He was passionate about being obedient to God, and if you beat him or put him in jail, it didn't stop him. He knew what he was called to do, and he was determined to do it. God had led him. God had called him. But even with all that, he gave him the people he needed to help him. Timothy, the first mentioned here, was sort of a co-writer to six of the letters that Paul wrote. He was sort of the right-hand man. We don't know very much about Timothy and what his life and ministry was outside of the Scriptures, except that he was a young man Paul met that was a convert, became a part of Paul's team, and was helpful to him. Helped him in writing, was supporting and encouraging to him. He calls him a fellow worker who sends greetings to the Roman church, too. And then he lists these three Jewish people who are part of his own ministry who have been helpers to him. We don't know exactly what they did, but they're important enough to him that he writes in this letter to the Roman church that they have been helpers or fellow workers with him while they were of the Jewish community. And then he gives a line. Paul's letters were written differently than we might. You know, we sit down with a piece of paper and write on a piece of paper, or you get a computer and you write on it. The letters that Paul wrote, especially this Roman letter, if you read that, it's very detailed and very complicated. And Paul dictated these things. He would sit down and he would dictate them, and there was kind of a shorthand that they had learned to use. You see people take dictation by hand, have a shorthand that they would use, and they would dictate. And they used the shorthand, then sit down and write it out in longhand. And then Paul would look at it and correct it, and then the guy would go back and write it out again. I mean, all this written by hand is a complicated thing to make a letter like this, as long as Paul's letter is. So, in the middle of this, he gives an opportunity for Tertius to express his own greetings to the people who are going to be reading this letter that he's worked on. It would take days for them to begin to write something like the book of Romans that we see. A long period of time, maybe even a month or two months, to make sure that everything is exactly the way Paul wanted it to be written. And he gives his own indication of the help that he was to him. Tertius, who wrote down this letter, greet you in the Lord. Paul had with him someone who could help him do that. It wasn't a matter that he needed to write these letters and maybe didn't have the time to begin to do all this, but God sent him someone with every one of his letters who could take the dictation and write it. We don't think about the provision that God made for Paul. And there were many letters that Paul wrote that we don't even have. God provides, when he gives us a job, exactly what we need to do that job. The people we need. The people who can do the work that needs to be done. Then he says, Gaius, whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy, sends you his greetings. He's writing this letter from Corinth. Gaius, obviously a man with some wealth. He says, Gaius, whose hospitality I and the whole church here enjoy. They didn't have church buildings like we have. They met in houses. He doesn't make it clear whether or not he's staying with Gaius, or whether Gaius' house is simply used as a place for people who might need some place to meet, like the church meeting every week where that's where they met, or whether it was simply a place where people traveling through the city of Corinth, it was a kind of a gateway to the Roman Empire, to and from, whether Christians traveling through Corinth could stay there. When he says the whole church, it's not clear whether he means everybody in Corinth who's a Christian, or the people from all over the known world who were traveling through that area were left to stay at his house. There were not any motels like we have, and not places you could go to eat when you were traveling. Many of these people in the churches were not able to have people in their homes. Their homes were very small, but sometimes wealthy people who are followers of Christ used their house for the regular meetings of the church. Now it's a big job to go to church, isn't it? But ladies, what if the church had to meet in your house every time we met? Morning, night, Wednesday nights, wouldn't that be a nightmare? But Gaius and his family provided a place for the church to meet. They didn't have buildings. Here's the workers that they need, the people who do the writing that Paul needs to have, the support for Paul, and even now, maybe he's even living in Gaius' house. Paul didn't have an income like somebody paid his salary. He made his living by making tents. So he had limited income, but God still provided for him. We ought to be conscious all the time that God never asks us to do something He doesn't make provision for. I've met frustrated pastors in my life, and one of the most frustrating things to them is that they have in their mind that God wants their church to do something, and then they look around the church and they say, we don't have the people or the money to do this. I remember in a prayer meeting one time with a pastor, he was almost crying. He said, boy, we could do such great work if we just had this kind of song leader in our church, but we don't have it, and so we're just stuck, and we can't do what God wants us to do. I don't believe that. It may be that you want to do something, and you don't have the people or money to do it, but if that happens, you might all stop and say, should we really do this? If God hasn't provided, maybe that's a sign for us. For if God says for us, I want you to do something, and He has all the resources available in the world, don't you think He would give you the resources to do whatever you wanted to do? Now, your workers, Alan, might not agree with this, but most good bosses, if you send them out to do a job, you give them everything they need to do the job. Because how foolish would you be if you say, I want you to go out and combine all the wheat, but I don't have a combine, and I don't know where you can get one. God's at least as smart as we are, and He doesn't ask us to do something with which He doesn't provide the resources for it. So here's Gaius providing the hospitality for Paul and the whole church, and he sends to you his greetings, the greetings that he has for them. Erastus, who's the city's director of public works, he sends a greeting. They even had somebody who was a government official who was a part of the church in Corinth. It had grown to have influence in such a way. And our brother, Quartus, we know nothing about brother Quartus except they send their greetings. In this little short list, it gives us a picture of the fact that Paul, while he gets a lot of credit, was not a lone ranger. He was a part of a great team of God's people doing the work. And the church is not filled with lone rangers. It's not the pastor that builds a church, and if he does, then it will fall when he leaves. It's the people in the church that build it. And they may have a leader or pastor, but if they work together, every single thing that they need to do can be done. The resources are given by God who asks for it. And then he ends this with sort of a summary of the entire book of Romans. Maybe we could have read these two or three verses and skipped all the rest of it, but it's kind of a summary. Now to him who is able... It's kind of a benedictory prayer. Now to him who is able to establish you. He means to strengthen you. That's what establish means. Establish to build something and make it strong. God, and to him who is able to strengthen or establish you. This is a very powerful thing for us. God has the ability to give us all the strength we need to do his work. If you find that his work is more than the strength that you have, one of two things is wrong. Either you're doing more than you're supposed to, which can happen, or you're trying to do it in your own strength, which can happen. For I write this to you because God is able to strengthen you. And how does he strengthen us? It's not by good sleep and exercise. The strength is by my gospel. Now the word gospel is used in the Bible in so many different ways it's almost impossible to define it at a particular time. It's really a word that just means good news. But you know the word good news can have a lot of different meanings. Your wife could come in and say, you know, I was able to clean the kitchen. And you say, that's good news. Your husband might come in and he says, I'm ready to fix these things in the house that have been broke for two years. That's good news. All kinds of things can be good news when you have that generic phrase. So when it occurs in the Bible, it reflects a lot of different things. And here he's talking about the good news, and Paul uses this my in front of it. My good news. He's really talking about Christ here. My good news and the proclamation. That's simply a longer word for preaching. It's really in the Greek language, the word for proclamation or preaching. And it can refer either to the message that is what is being preached. Or it can refer to the act of preaching. So here Paul says now to him who's able to strengthen you. And you'll be strengthened by the good news that I've been giving you about Christ. And you'll be strengthened by the proclamation of Jesus Christ. In other words, telling you preaching the content of who Jesus was. And preaching the message of Jesus will give you strength. And here's why that's true. When we're called to be followers, we're called to be followers of Christ. How can you grow in your spiritual life if you don't know what Christ is like? And the good news is when somebody comes up and says, I have a big job for you to do, go do it. You wait a minute. Tell me what I'm supposed to do, you know. Well, the good news is they can explain it to you. And then give you the ability to do it. So we say to you, you say you're going to become a follower of Christ. Would you like to know what Christ was like so you can follow him? That's essential to this whole ingredient. So now to him who's able to give you strength by the message of Christ. And the preaching about who Christ is. This is done, he says, according to the revelation or the unveiling. Revelation simply means to uncover something. According to the uncovering of the mysteries. And this word mystery is a favorite word of Paul's. It doesn't mean like a mystery story where you don't know who the bad guy is. And we say, so this is hidden from us. It's more like something that's in the open and absolutely evident to everybody. But you don't know what it means. It's like you would have a tool that someone might use. And you could see the tool and you want to look like, but you didn't know what it was for. So he's talking about in the Old Testament that the message of God was clear in the Old Testament. Let me give you an example. The Jews thought that they were the special people of God because they were descendants of Abraham. And they looked down on the Gentiles because they were not descendants of Abraham. And in the contract that God made with Abraham, he said, Abraham, if you'll come and go where I want you to go, I'll lead you to the land we're going to give to you. I'll provide for you. I'll protect you. I'll make you a great nation. And in that promise to Abraham, he said, and Abraham, through you, all the nations of the world will be blessed. In that one phrase to Abraham, God already told them that the descendants of Abraham would be a blessing to all the Gentile world. Even though he said that, they never really understood it. They thought of the Gentiles as being foreign and unacceptable to God, unacceptable to God, as dirty. So when Paul's and Peter's sitting on the rooftop, and the sheet is let down with all these animals in it, and he says, God says, eat from it. He said, no, I don't ever do anything bad and eat anything bad. And God said, don't say anything I've made is bad. He made Peter understand for the first time that the Gentiles were not bad. They were not unclean. And so he was to go and see the power of the gospel in the house of this Gentile he went to. So in the very beginning, God's saying to Abraham, I'm going to make you a great blessing to the Gentile world connected God's great mission. I'm going to use you to influence all of the non-Jews. That's the goal here. And from the very beginning, this was uncovered. But it was a mystery. They couldn't get it. The best idea that I have about this mystery thing, and I don't know how to explain it very well, except that one time when I was in the house of a lady, she had a plaque on the wall. And she said, what does that plaque say? And I looked at it and I looked, I couldn't figure it out. Finally, she went up there with her hand. She traced it. J-E-S-U-S. And they make those things like it's the background that stands out. And I couldn't see those letters until she showed me. And once she showed me that, it was so clear and so plain to me. It was evident. I could look at it. I could see everything there. But because I didn't know how to make sense of it by looking at the right things, it was hidden from me. That's what the word mystery really is. It's plain and clear throughout the Bible what God's going to do. But we only see it when we come to see Jesus and look backward at it. And then we say, oh, why did we ever miss that? This mystery. He's uncovered this mystery hidden for long ages in the past. But now it's revealed. This word mystery has three participles. Hidden for a long time, for long ages from the past. And the second one is now revealed. And third is made known through the prophetic writings. Now, that sounds odd. But it reaffirms this word mystery. It was made plain in the prophetic writings. He said, if you look back at the prophetic writings, the writings of the prophets, the Old Testament, they were talking about the fact that the message of God was going to go around the world. It was clear there. Now that we look back, we can see it. So we take the book of Isaiah and we read those passages there and we say, this was about Jesus, the suffering servant. You know, we say this is about Jesus. And it comes at Christmas time. Whenever we read the story of the Christmas story, we read the passages of Isaiah that say, yeah, this is talking about Jesus. They read those passages in Isaiah. They couldn't see Jesus in it. But after Jesus comes and lives his life, we look back and they're so clear. We think, why did the Jews never see this? That's what he's talking about. Now that Christ has come, the veil is lifted from us and we can see through the prophetic writings of the past how God has revealed these things. But now it's revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God. That's how it is. It is God who goes up to the plaque on the wall and with his fingers spells the J-E-S-U-S. He's the one that lets us know. He's the one that makes it clear to us so that the nations might believe and obey him. The eternal God, the God who created the world and is going to be here forever, has come to say to us, here is what the story of Christ is about. Here is what the whole thing about Abraham is about. It is about Jesus Christ who's come and given himself as a sacrifice for you. The eternal God, so that all the nations might believe and obey him. We separate believe and obey. The Bible joins them. If you really believe in God, you will obey what he tells you. So all the nations now, not just the Jews, but the non-Jews, all have access to this. To the only wise God, be glory forever. To the only wise God, be glory forever through Jesus Christ. All of this is accomplished because of the great wisdom of God. And we give glory and honor to him forever for what he's done. Would you bow your heads please for a moment. The majesty of all this. God planned for thousands of years for this to take place. All the time he knew what he was going to do. He even gave the prophets words. And they wrote them without clearly understanding what their ultimate meaning was. They thought sometimes he was talking about the Jewish nation. But now we look back and we see he was talking about Jesus himself. And he brought that plan into place. If you have trusted your life to Christ, you are a part of this great plan that God has. He has a purpose for you. And his purpose is not that you would be happy. Or that you'd have a good life. But that you would work to accomplish the very purpose he has. To bring life to people in the world. That they might find Christ and be established and strengthened in him. And live this life of obedience and submission to him. He wants to do this by living in you. So that your neighbors see Christ in you. Your family sees Christ in you. Your friends see Christ in you. And they're overwhelmed by the difference between you and them. The great mission that he's given us. He provides everything we need to do it. All he needs is our willingness and our obedience. All of us should have someone that we know. Who's not a follower of Christ. For whom we're praying. And asking God to give us opportunity to tell them what Christ has done in us. Mighty God, whose power is unlimited. Whose provision is unlimited. You have given us a part in this great mystery. The mystery now clearly revealed. To change the lives of people in the face of this earth. Let us know to whom we are assigned. Let us take it seriously. And help us to call on you for every resource we need to do it. For you're the glory. You're the Lord. All powerful and mighty. Who always accomplishes your purpose. Help us to be a part of it. Amen. Amen.