Saturated Words (Part C)

Now, this is ours. We preserve the Word, the New Testament, the New Covenant in light of the Old Testament, and we are to transmit it. And you say, well, ask yourself, how do you transmit the scripture?

What's the first step? Prayer. Ask God. James said, you know, you pray, you ask, but you get not, because you ask amiss. Maybe you're asking for the wrong things.

Maybe God wants to leave those things in your life, but there's some other things you're neglecting because you're too busy trying to get this out of your life. I've been there before. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the Book of Romans.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. Today, Pastor Rick will continue teaching in the Book of Romans Chapter 9, but he'll begin in Revelation Chapter 5 first here on Cross-Reference Radio. Revelation Chapter 5, we have a whole section on how unworthy everybody else is when it comes to the very thing Paul is talking about. There in the fifth chapter of Romans, pardon me, Revelation, then I saw a strong angel.

There are no weak ones that I've come across in Scripture. Well, there was one that had a hard time, and Gabriel had to come help him out. Anyway, what was it, Michael? Anyway, I digress.

Coming back to this. Then I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, who is worthy to open the scroll and to loose its seals. And no one in heaven or on the earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or look at it. Revelation 5, 4.

So I wept much because no one was found worthy to open and read the scroll or to look at it. What I'm attempting to do is contrast the passion of Paul, and yet with all that passion, he was still inferior. And yet that passion and inferiority are the very things God used. Paul said, I will boast in my infirmities because God is made strong when I am weak like this. Then it goes on to the 12th verse. He heard a loud voice saying, worthy is the Lamb who was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.

Covers everything. We can't die for our own sins or anybody else's. We are not a worthy sacrifice.

Only the debt free can help those who are indebted when it comes to this. And just Peter said, the precious blood of Christ as of the Lamb without blemish, without spot. We have no record though of Paul offering himself this way to Gentiles.

He doesn't say I could go to hell for the Gentiles. Doesn't mean he didn't feel it. He repeatedly cast himself into harm's way on their behalf.

Earlier, again, he wrote in his second Corinthian letter, I will very gladly spend to be spent for your souls, though the more abundantly I love you, the less I am loved. If you've been in public ministry, you get it. You pour out yourself to people who don't appreciate it many times. Many times it turn against you when you've done nothing wrong.

Slander you behind your back. And yet, that all can happen and what also can happen is you don't grow bitter over it. You fight to not become jaded. You ask the God, how do I stay in the fight? I have said from this pulpit, a few decades ago and in between, I don't intend to have any new Christian out zeal me.

I know it may butchers the language a little bit, but you got the point. You see a new Christian come, he's all excited about God, he's in all this energy. I have more than him. Just that I've learned how to harness it. I've learned how to apply it. But I'm not going to let him be more excited than me about my salvation in spite of the fact that I've taken many more hits over the decades than some new Christian. And I think all of us should feel that way. I'm not going to let the fires go out.

They may grow dim sometimes, but I'm going to take care of that. I'm going to be passionate about my faith whether I like it or not. You catch that? If you don't learn to talk back to your flesh, he's going to slap you around every chance he gets. You got to stand up to it. You'll take a lot of hits, you'll get knocked down sometimes, but you'll always get back up.

You don't have to take that kind of mess from the cursed part of your being because there's a part of you that is filled with the Holy Spirit and he resides with you. And it's called fighting for that which is worth fighting for. He says here, my countrymen according to the flesh. Well again, it hurt to see them overrule fact and reason. I don't care about fact.

I don't care about reason. The no condemnation, the no separation stopped appealing to them. It started appealing more to the Gentiles. Verse 4, who are Israelites to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises. Now he's going to go on in verse 5.

We're going to stop here in verse 4 and comment on this because again, he's at a loss. They have all of this stuff. Why are we having this conversation? Why can't they just see that Christ is their Messiah?

Six benefits he lists here. Rightly belonged to Israel, God's chosen people because God gave it to them. Who are Israelites, that's the adoption governed by God now because of God.

He speaks of their glory. Well, that's the presence of Christ, the Shekinah, or the presence of Yahweh in Old Testament language. Entering into relationship with Yahweh, that's the covenants. Then there is the law receiving his revelation. The law, the rabbis would say, the fence of the law. Do you know how many people think law is not to be a fence for them? They don't like the law.

Too many rules, too many rules. They're there for a reason. If you've ever been up on a skyscraper while it's under construction, which you probably have not, but if you have, you'd know there's a particular crew, a gang, dedicated to safety because the elevator shafts are killers. Once you put the beams up and you put the corrugated metal decking down, those shafts are still there like booby traps and those guys are right on it.

They weld up the posts and they run the quarter inch cable through it and they clamp it and now you've got a fence that protects you from falling in that shaft. This is the law of God. These are rules that those given authority are supposed to have on behalf of the people, the fence of the law. And it's unfortunate that there's so many Christians that think that lawlessness is somehow a virtue.

It is not. He mentions the service here in verse 4, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God. That would be the temple worship. And then the promises, and I'll come back to these.

We've got time. That is the inherited blessings that they have, the prophetic blessings that they also enjoyed. We would think that these would work together to seal their faith, not fate, faith.

It did for some, but not the majority. You would think with all the Bible has to say against popular behaviors that churches and churchgoers would get it, that they would side against blatant sin. And yet we watch them just one after another cave in, try to make a way for sin to be honorable.

It is a serious deal. You would think there's enough scripture for anyone to read, amend their ways and synchronize their lifestyle and their behavior with God. I mean we get the fight.

We understand the resistance. We all stumble and we all look to move, get past these things. But at no time should a Christian who stumbles say, well that's okay. You know, yeah I ran them into the ditch, but they deserved it. Okay, I'm sorry, I had to confess that. No, I didn't do that, and I've not tried to do that.

And I've not even thought about doing that. Anyway, back to this. For the great majority of Paul's people, the investments of God fail to overturn stubbornness. That's the story of Jonah, incidentally, as a reminder. A stubbornness with all the scripture that they have, with all the, you would think after that experience in the fish that a person would say, you know, whatever God says to me from this day forward, I'm doing.

And Jonah did, on the outside, but not on the inside. And verse six says, don't blame anyone or anything but yourselves. You have the scripture.

What are you going to do with it? And the ancient Jews, they prevailed on those bloodstained battlefields until they became spiritual turncoats. What a lesson is in that. And when they were defeated and sin was raised up before them, they dealt with it. It was just a story of Ai and Achan and Joshua. Just an incredible, beautiful story fraught with lessons. Anyway, as I'm talking here, you know, I'm having flashbacks of other sermons I would like to give. I would like to talk about Balaam and the star and the scepter. Anyway, that's just a little wandering thought.

What is he thinking? Well, I just told you. To whom pertain the adoption? The Jews, they tend to forget that they too were adopted, and here it is right here. He's talking about the Jews. He said they were adopted.

God reached out to Israel through Abraham, there in Genesis 12, and he talks about it through Ezekiel in the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel. The thing about adoption is that the adopter does not have to adopt. Adoption is initiated in the heart of the one that's doing the adoption. It is an apt metaphor, bringing the outsider in. And it is applied to both the Jews, the people of God, and to the Gentiles, the church of God.

Both of us are adopted. Adoption is a faith-based election. Genesis chapter three, verse six, Abraham believing God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness. Yeah, he was the beginning. So he talks here in the verse that we're in, whatever one it is, verse four, he talks about the glory now, the adoption, the glory.

That's the Shekinah. The Hebrew root for that word is dwelling, God dwelling or to dwell, and it's often translated the presence. And this shows up, for example, Exodus 25, and let them make me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them. Well, question, as Christians, do you think God built his church, he had a lesser approach or an equal approach?

Equal. God build me a church and I'll dwell amongst them. There's a great big difference between a church and a crowd that calls itself a church. The distinction is adherence to the scripture. I mean, there are a lot of churches that, you know, you can do things different ways, but not with the essential doctrines.

You can't tamper with them. And the non-essential doctrines are there to make us, to force us to think so we don't go clobbering one another. It's because they don't agree with us on a non-essential issue. The covenants, no other nation, no other nation received these investments. These covenants, just six of them, for example, the Abrahamic covenant, God with Abraham, restated to Isaac and Jacob, who were incidentally chosen over two others that just really weren't excited, they weren't passionate about Yahweh, and that would be Ishmael and Esau. God sidestepped those two men and he zeroed in on Isaac and Jacob and he restated the Abrahamic covenant to them because it was that big of a deal. Then there's the Mosaic covenant that codified the moral and the ritual laws that we still have to this day. There's the covenant concerning the promised land in Deuteronomy 29 and 30. There are the Davidic covenants. It goes back to the star. You know, we talk about the star of David. Well, you know, Balaam, he saw Israel as a star coming out with the scepter. Again, I digress.

My devotional time is coming into the sermon time, which always happens, but it's often fragmented. And anyway, then there's the new covenant, Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 24. The giving of the law, he says, there are the guard rails. Again, a fact lost on too many. God's law to Jews through whom the nations were warned. All those surrounding nations. All right, so we look at Jericho, for example.

Oh, you know, so tragic. God had the Jews kill all those people. They could have surrendered.

They could have left. They chose to stand and resist. And who has resisted God and prospered? Who has hardened his heart against God and prospered, asks the proverb. Well, coming back to this, the giving of the law, along with the privilege of preserving, they had the privilege of preserving the word and transmitting it.

Now this is ours. We preserve the word, the New Testament, the new covenant in light of the Old Testament, and we ought to transmit it. And you say, well, ask yourself, how do you transmit the scripture?

What's the first step? Prayer. Ask God. James said, you know, you pray, you ask, but you get not, because you ask amiss. Maybe you're asking for the wrong things. Maybe God wants to leave those things in your life, but there's some other things you're neglecting because you're too busy trying to get this out of your life. I've been there before.

It's a hard place to be. Ask God to bring an unbeliever to church. Look, we have seen people converted to Christ in this church just by verse by verse teaching, even in the Old Testament. So if you say, well, you know, we can't preach the word, they might not get saved.

Nonsense. It's all God-breathed scripture. It's the Holy Spirit that saves them. He knows how to speak to all of us any time he wants to, but the fact remains, how will they hear unless they're preached to, and how will they preach if they don't get under the word?

Anyway, the laws always represent the values of the lawgiver, and in this case, the care of the lawgiver. Presently, the role of the church with pinpoint accuracy points to the fulfillment of Old Testament scriptures concerning the Messiah. Pinpoint accuracy. We can name where he was born. We can name his name. We can name what he did, the prophecy he fulfilled. We have a pinpoint accuracy when it comes to identifying the Messiah. And when our Lord spoke to the woman at the well, she spoke of her culture's religion, the worship that belonged to her culture as a Samaritan. Jesus rejected her religion, and he said to her, salvation is of the Jews. You don't have it.

Nobody else has got it. I gave it to the Jews, and I'm going to give it to the church, which was not yet born, and he couldn't really go that way. He did. He said there's coming a time, and so he did begin to open those doors. He was speaking of the oracles of God that the Jews were entrusted with, the prophets, the law, the writings, which all spoke of him. Romans 3, verse 2, to them were committed the oracles of God, and so it is to us. You can't say, boy, I'm glad we don't have that burden.

No, we do have it, and it is only a burden because of the battles that have to be fought to get it across. Within those oracles is the only way to heaven. And so again, you say, yeah, you know, I hear this. I feel guilty. I'm not doing enough for the gospel.

Are you at least praying to do something about it? And look, when God called me to ministry, it took years, a lot of heartache. It was miserable at times, but the calling was sure, and I like to talk about my victories. I don't like to talk about my failures.

They talk about themselves enough. Anyway, the service of God, he says here in verse 4, the temple, the holy days, the feast days, that is, their daily sacrifices, the ceremonial ritual of worship associated with the law given in the book of Exodus and Leviticus to Moses by God. The promises, well, these have to do with the Messiah and Israel's final restoration, which is going to come. And you could read, for example, Isaiah 9, 6, where unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.

You know, he shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father. There's a glimpse of the Trinity within all of that. And then you have Daniel, chapter 9, which talks about Israel's future. It's all there. The promises are there.

They were custodians of these things. Gentiles are included in these prophecies and promises, messianic and millennial promises woven into the fabric of the Old Testament. Luke 24, beginning at Moses and all the prophets, Jesus expounded to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. And the restoration of Israel is about Jesus Christ, about who he is and how he treats those who come to him in spite of a checkered past. Verse 5, Of whom are the fathers, and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, who is over all the eternally blessed God. Amen. So he's saying, listen, Christ came through your Jewish people. He came through us.

What are we going to do with this? It's so difficult. How do I impart my faith to somebody else?

I can't just plug in something and download my faith into them. The fathers were the patriarchs and other great servants. This would include Ruth and Esther also. How much should we learn from them? Their testimonies were a national heritage of the Jews.

Still are, though they don't tap into its benefit. God has given them, the Old Testament patriarchs, the fathers and mothers of the faith, as benchmarks for New Testament saints for us to emulate. To look at them and say, I want to be like David, dancing before the ark, with all my heart, having all this passion, with all my might. I want to be like Abraham.

I want to be like this one. They're preserved for us. Just read Hebrews chapter 11. And from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came.

In fulfillment of hundreds of prophecies, hundreds of promises, God assumed humanity put on flesh and bone physically. He was related to Abraham and King David, and he is no longer bound by human flesh. Paul says, according to the flesh, we know him no more. He is no longer saddled with his humanity. He gave it up.

So it made no sense to Paul, but he did not allow this to strip him of passion. I noticed that when something is irrational to me, I begin to lose passion. I begin to get disgusted. I said, this is stupid. I'm not having a part of this. Well, you better learn how to say, Lord, what do I do with this? This is really dumb.

What do I do with this? And that's the road that Paul traveled on. We must not be so hungry for doctrine that we skip passion born out of doctrine. And Paul did not skip the passionate part. 2 Corinthians 3, not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. But that spirit never moves forward without the letter of God's doctrine. You cannot separate the two. Well, as much as he loved his people and lost souls, he never backed down from his convictions. This is critical.

We're closing in with this, wrapping this up. Paul did not back down from truth just because he was passionate about somebody. Well, I love you so much. Okay, I won't believe what I believe anymore for to make you happy.

That never happened. It should happen to us, but it does happen to some professed Christians. Oh, I love Jesus.

I sing songs. And then they turn on him. They cave in. And then they go find a church that allows them to cave in. And then they badmouth the churches that uphold the scripture.

Didn't attack them personally. Just said, no, that's not what the scripture says. We're trying the thus say the Lord thing in here. That's what we're going after.

And when we don't get it, we'll look in there to see how we deal with that. Who is over all eternity? Blessed God.

Amen. You know, last time I was up here, Romans chapter 8, that's out talking about this invincible salvation we have. I thought it was going to be a home run sermon, but it was sort of preaching to the choir.

But a section like this, you can, as a teacher, you can sink into because it's so easily missed. As you come to this ninth and 10th, 11th chapter, you can miss the passion in the heart of the man that we crave for concerning unbelievers because we get entangled with what everybody else is saying doctrinally. I've been praying, Lord, just let me stay focused on what was happening the day the man wrote these things because there is our benefit. And this is what he wrote about Jesus Christ. He is over all.

That doesn't leave out anyone. Then he says, eternally, blessed God. That means he's self-existent. That means he is God, equal with the Father. No robbery there. One of the most explicit, indisputable statements in the entire scripture concerning the deity of Christ, which makes you look at people like the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and say, what are you doing to yourselves?

How do you get around these things? So he closed with this verse. First Timothy, God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen by angels, preached amongst the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up in glory. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross-Reverence Radio. This is the daily radio ministry of Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia.

We're currently going through the book of Romans. If you're in need of hearing this message again, or want to listen to others like it, head over to crossreferenceradio.com. We encourage you to subscribe to our podcast too, so you'll never miss another edition. Just go to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. On our website, you'll be able to learn a little more about the ministry of Cross-Reference Radio, so make a note of it, crossreferenceradio.com. That's all we have time for today, but thanks so much for listening. Pastor Rick will be back next time in the book of Romans, here on Cross-Reference Radio.