The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord and he delights in his way. Yeah, the Lord delights in the way of the righteous man who is following the leading and not coming up with plans that are born out of his own ambitions and not supported by God. And that puts God in a difficult spot many times.
He still will bless oftentimes because you've kind of put him in a situation where the alternative is unacceptable to him and so he's going to still work with it, but it won't come out the way you had hoped. 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.
And now here's Pastor Rick in Romans chapter 15 with this edition of Cross-Reference Radio. When you don't like a certain people, a racial thing, and it's not, you know, it's more to this than just black and white. Maybe, you know, they're, it's all the different peoples on the earth. There's all sorts of this stuff going around.
It's been around forever. It's not easy to shake free from it because the flesh does not like to give up anything it lays its greedy little fingers on. But you have to fight for it.
And that's the whole thing with the Gentile Jew thing is Paul said, hey, you better overcome this junk. You're not permitted to be a racist. You have to be above it. Yeah, you may see things in other cultures that you don't care for.
Fine. Don't eat their food. But you better love them. Pastoring 101. They don't have to love you.
You better love them. And that's Christianity 101. He says in word indeed. Well, some have the word without the word. They like talking Bible stuff.
They just don't do anything. The result is a hollow witness. The world can see through that. The guy's always preaching the Bible, yet he's always stealing other people's food out the refrigerator at work or something like that. Then there are others who have the work, but they don't have the word.
The word is secondary to them. There's nothing wrong with having a pantry, a church pantry kind of a thing. But if that's all you got, all you've done is given out calories. You leave your surroundings in the same darkness you found it.
You've got to have them both. Ergo James, the letter of James. He talks about this very thing. Show me your faith. Show me your works. Show me your faith.
They go together. Paul preached the same thing. To make the Gentiles obedient. Well, that's a command. John's Gospel 14 verse 15, if you love me, keep my commandments.
Obey me. Because there's more of that kind of love for Jesus than just love. There's this lordship that doesn't belong, that we don't assign to anyone else outside the Godhead. Verse 19, in mighty signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God. So that from Jerusalem and round about to Illicrium, I have fully preached the Gospel of Christ. Man, you've got to love these words.
You have to see something in there that says, I want to do these things. Unmistakable, awesome evidences, signs and wonders. They were to create awe unto salvation. They weren't entertainment.
They weren't just, wow, that was interesting. They were to inspire faith, trust in God. So that from Jerusalem round about to Illicrium, that's about 1400 miles from Jerusalem to this region of the world, which we used to call Yugoslavia, it's Albania, Montenegro, that up by the Aegean Sea, right across from Italy. Did Paul make it there? You know, just because we don't read everything there is about Paul, but we read quite a bit. He mentions in his second letter to Timothy in the fourth chapter, 10th verse, he mentions that Titus, one of Paul's underpastors, went to Dalmatia, which is in that region of the world, which suggests that Paul did reach that area and dispatched Titus as he was want to do. I have fully preached the gospel of Christ, this is important, without forcing it. We don't have a record of Paul forcing the gospel. The closest we might get to that is when he tried to intellectually engage the so-called intellectuals in Athens. Remember, to God nobody's an intellectual.
You're kidding, right? Anyway, Abraham, our beloved Abraham, he dotted the promised land with what? Alters. You could take a pushpin, you'd run out a pushpin, stick it in, well Abraham put an altar here, he put one here, then he went up here and he put one there. The man was constantly bowing down to God, worshipping his God, and leaving his altar behind, because the altar was not his God. Which, I say that because to the pagans that would have been, I can't believe he left his altar behind. Paul, he altered, pun intended, I want points for that one, he altered the landscape of the Roman Western Empire with converts and churches.
He put pushpins, the church here started, Paul gets to Ephesus and he finds some believers, but they're really, they weren't solid at all, they had a vague understanding and he fixed that, made Ephesus one of the most powerful of the early churches, and also one of the first to succumb to lovelessness for Christ. We move to verse 20, and so I have made it my aim to preach the gospel. Not where Christ was named, lest I should build on another man's foundation.
If you had a blood pressure cuff hooked to me right now, it would spike up. This is one that just really grates on me, I want to be gracious, but very firm, but I do not want to be self-righteous. Well, I'll get to the other stuff before I get through it, and I've been praying about this all week, Lord I don't want to come off as being self-righteous, but I can't stand this. Well Paul had that too, he couldn't stand anybody saying, well you could be a Christian if you become, you know, circumcised, that just drove, you know, his blood pressure would spike on that.
I'm not Paul, but that doesn't mean I can't have a little fun. The word aim here is a compound Greek word, it means love the honorable. Aim is a proper translation, it gets us to where he's going with this. He's saying I have made it my love of the honorable, to preach the gospel. And I guess the translators, you know, again, tough job they have, they sometimes get it wrong, we'll come to one in a little bit, they scratch their head, and they said, well he's aiming for this, and it's an honorable evangelism. There's no, you know, hide a Bible track in the guy's sandwich or something and hope that he bites into it, takes it out and reads it and gets saved. That's not what we do. You know, if I leave enough Bible verses around, they'll get saved.
No, they just might get irritated with you. So be careful in how we share Christ, 2 Corinthians 6-3, we give no offense in anything that our ministry may not be blamed. Send that to Kenneth Copeland and the rest of those greedy, grubby, no good.
Well, I got other things to get irritated about, let's get to it. When you'll see, you know, well anyway, he says it's not where Christ was named. So Paul put churches where no churches were.
He didn't say, listen, you're in Rome, it's a great church there, I'm going to come to Rome and visit you and I'm going to put a church right across the street from your church. Then you two can compete with each other. See, I can feel it coming up. I have to fight this. I do not want to get into flesh, but I again do not want to lose any of the punch because it is destructive, this behavior that I'm going to address. He says, listen, I should build on another man's foundation. See, this is common among self-proclaimed Bible teachers to go into an area and bring more of the same and in the process strip what was already there. It is a spiritual crime to poach on someone else's field of labor. I'm not talking about different denominations because they are different. I'm talking more, it's more with the newer independent churches that just keep popping up everywhere and doing the same thing the other one is doing.
Okay, that's one problem. It's another problem when to do that, to start that church, you steal from another church that's already established because you can't get them on your own because God's not blessing you. If they knew the Bible, they would not do this. They would not go into a church and begin to steal people to their Bible study, which is what they do. I have a righteous indignation towards that behavior.
It's like you're messing with my child. You put so much into ministry not to have some Christian come in, nest in the church, make friends and then steal them away. When Paul and Barnabas split, they went in separate directions. Paul didn't say, well Barnabas is going to Crete, I'm going there too.
I could do a better job than him. There are wrong ways to do a right thing and we got to remember this. Of all the places without a good church, why don't you go there?
Well, I know how those boys and girls work. I won't suffer them. If I find out they're in the church, they're out. They hurt God's work. They are Absalom's at the gate. Am I coming off loving?
We should have like some sort of a monitor in the back I can look at. Okay, I'm still in the green zone. I don't want to get, because I'm passionate about something, I do not want to come off as being loveless. But it is, if it turns into a contest and you're against the work of Christ in the name of Christ, I'm not siding with you. They hurt God's work as I mentioned. There's an arrogance that goes with this in Psalm, there's an ignorance in others, probably in many times they're both, they're seduces and they are deceivers. So I mentioned Absalom. Absalom was the son of the king, King David. And Absalom decided he wanted to steal the kingdom from his father David. And so what Absalom used to do is he would go to the gate of the city, that is the city hall, where the king held court. And he would position himself in such a place that he was able to intercept people that were coming to the court with cases.
And he would say, oh man, if I were the king, you'd have no problem with this. So we pick it up, 2 Samuel 15 verse 2, Absalom would rise early and stand beside the way to the gate. In this manner, verse 6 of 2 Samuel 15, Absalom acted toward all Israel who came to the king for judgment. So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel.
And the result was a bloody civil war. Absalom of course was skewed by ruthless Joab in the process. There was another character involved with this, Ahithophel, one of the wisest men in the kingdom at that time. And he had a grudge against David. And so he sided with Absalom.
And he too, Ahithophel, went and hung himself when he saw that their plot failed. James says this, and I think it applies to this behavior, this wisdom does not descend from above but is earthly, sensual, demonic. Again, I know some have done it out of ignorance, some out of self-righteousness, some out of both. So I'm done with that.
I have much more to say, but I'm proud of myself because I'm not saying it. I will add this, if you challenge another Christian on this matter, you're going to lose because it's right there in the scripture. Don't poach on another man's field. Verse 21, But as it is written, To whom he was not announced, they shall see, and those who have not heard shall understand. He's quoting Isaiah. Oh, surprise, Paul quoting scripture all the time, this man. Everything he has to say is based on what God has already said. Now Gentiles did not ask for the gospel.
They were out doing their thing. However, when the New Testament church comes along, many of them were sick of the mythologies that they were exposed to. They knew their religions were fake, and that's why they ran into Christianity. Christianity had something to offer, and the Christians offered it the right way as a rule. But it didn't take long before Satan got in there with the Gnostics and other false teachers and things like that. So, you know, that's part of living in this world.
That doesn't mean you've got to be on that side. And so the Gentiles did not ask for Christ, but God sent his disciples to them anyway. The church in Rome, if you remember, where did that come from? Well, Pentecost, likely, the pilgrims came to Pentecost from Rome. The Spirit fell upon so many Jews, they got saved there, and they went back to their lands that they had come from, and they remained Christians, and they established themselves. Verse 22, he says, For this reason I also have been much hindered from coming to you.
What reason? He was too busy blazing the trail to get to Rome. He was too busy starting churches where no churches were. He couldn't get to where there was a church that he wanted to bless. This letter bore fruit even beyond Rome.
We're part of that fruit down through the ages. All the other churches, this letter eventually got to Ephesus, and it got to Thessalonica, and Philippi, and all the other ones. He longed to bless people with what God had given him, refusing to bury the light. He wrote in the beginning of this letter, Without ceasing, I make mention of you always in my prayers. They're on his heart, and we'll find that out.
We'll see that next chapter. Making requests, if by some means, now, at last, I may find a way in the will of God to come to you, for I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gifts so that you may be established. Now, I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that I often plan to come to you, but was hindered till now. So he's in Corinth writing this letter. His plan is to leave Corinth, to get to Jerusalem, celebrate the Passover, leave Jerusalem, and end up in Rome and then Spain. That's his plan. Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, because the enemy is going to be waiting for him in Jerusalem. So this ambition was there for many years, it tells us, in verse 23 also. Years earlier, he was hindered from returning to Thessalonica.
Okay, what are we considering? We're considering an admirable, aggressive ambition, and he has it constantly running. Back when he had started, he went to Philippi, started a church there, saved the Philippian jailer in his household, left that church because he was driven out of that city. He goes, he and Silas, to Thessalonica.
So Thessalonica, they chase him out of Thessalonica, he goes to Berea, they chase him out of there, so that's how he ends up in Corinth, eventually. But he writes to the Thessalonians, he says in the second chapter of the first letter to them, therefore I wanted to come to you, even I Paul, time and again, but Satan hindered us. So what I'm trying to draw our attention to is that it wasn't Satan, per se, keeping him from Rome.
He was busy making churches, planting churches. But it was Satan that kept him from Thessalonica, as he says. So it's not always Satan who interferes with our admirable ambitions. Opportunities in other parts of the Empire kept him from reaching Rome sooner than what he planned, and it may be the same for us. So coming back to being led by the Spirit, God, not personal ambition. His ambition was not personal.
It was God-given. God directed his steps. Acts chapter 16, he speaks about he and Barnabas, they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia. Now Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, and then after you get north of Turkey you're into Asia, according to the ancient maps. And so he is telling them, and we're being told in the book of Acts, that there were places the Holy Spirit said it's not time for you to go there, I want you to go here.
Can't be two places at the same time, here's where I want you. Psalm 37 verse 23 puts it all together for us. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he delights in his way. Yeah, the Lord delights in the way of the righteous man who is following the leading and not coming up with plans that are born out of his own ambitions and not supported by God. And that puts God in a difficult spot many times.
He still will bless oftentimes because you've kind of put him in a situation where the alternative is unacceptable to him, and so he's going to still work with it, but it won't come out the way you had hoped, and eventually he'll bring that to light. So the best thing to do is to learn to be led by the Spirit. Verse 23, but now no longer having a place in these parts and having a great desire, these many years to come to you. Well, these parts that he's referring to is Asia Minor, where the seven churches of Revelation are, Colosseus, or some others, and Troy and other places. Macedonia, that would be where Philippi and, there's another one, oh Thessalonica. And then Acacia, where there's the church at Corinth and Centuria, so that's what he's referring to. He says, I'm done with, I've planted churches here, now I'm going to get to you. That's my plan. He raised up churches that were self-sufficient, which is honorable.
They could take care of themselves. Verse 24, whenever I journey to Spain, I shall come to you, for I hope to see you on my journey and to be helped on my way there by you, if first I may enjoy your company for a while. Spain, where Jonah was trying to get to, to get away, to escape the call of God. Just sort of like Jeremiah, like Jonah said, you know Jeremiah may have been tricked, I'm not falling for it. I'm making light of it, because it's one of the most magnificent stories in the Bible. A man called by God, went opposite of God, and God went and got him, and his belt was off when he got him. He gave Jonah a nice spanking. Fantastic story, and probably the greatest part of the story of Jonah to me, is that he tells us what happened.
He says, look at what a fool I was, and he leaves it like that, for us to say, yeah you're right, I don't want to be like that. Well, we have no knowledge that Paul knew there was a church in Spain, but he did know there were Jews, a lot of Jews in Spain, and he knew therefore there would be synagogues there, and as was his habit, he used the synagogues to launch the churches. First he appealed to the Jews to win them, and if they, of course, resisted him, and there were any that did side with him, out of that would usually come the church. He would have a short stay in Rome, that was his plan.
He says, I shall come to you, but not as he envisions, to be helped on my way by you. There is a vague hint about Paul making it to Spain, a reference decades after Paul's death by Clement of Rome, not, there were no popes. The popes were concocted centuries later, there were no popes at this time anyway. The early Christian writer, Clement, at the end of the first century, he makes a comment in his writings, and these writings are still available in Clement, First Clement, chapter 5, verse 7, he says that Paul went to the limits of the West, and in those days Spain was that.
And so that would, you know, it's not biblical, but that doesn't mean it's not true, it's historical, and much of history is accurate. And so we move on, if first, continuing in verse 24, if first I may enjoy your company for a while. Paul will learn just how much these Christians loved him when he comes to Rome. He survived the storm, he survived the swords and the serpent, the shipwreck, and he comes to Rome in handcuffs and chains. And we read in Acts chapter 28, one of the most touching parts of the book of Acts, Luke writes, and Luke was with him for this, he witnessed it, he says, and from there, when the brethren heard about us, that's Luke, including himself, they came to meet us as far as Apai forum and three inns. When Paul saw them, he thanked God and took courage.
That's probably Luke's way of saying Paul got choked up when he saw them come 40 miles to intercept him in a loving way. There he is, the stories have probably gone out, you know, Paul is in chains, he's coming as a prisoner of Rome, in their mind, he's prisoner of God, not Rome's, and they leave what they're doing to come out to welcome him to Rome and they accompany him on the back, likely bringing bread and fruit and drinks and things, just what an amazing picture. There is more to Christianity than surviving.
That's a picture of love. He survived the shipwreck and the serpent and the storm, all that stuff, and he is rewarded with loving Christians. Verse 25, but now I am going to Jerusalem to minister to the saints.
Well, that miserable and worthwhile adventure awaits him, he will enter Jerusalem a free man, he will depart Jerusalem a prisoner, he will enter Rome a hero, and that's why they came out to see him. So you're looking at the life of this person, this is what God does to the one that surrenders, and we get sidetracked by boredom, by little things, you know, a faithful in the little things, what does that mean? You're not squeezing out of your Christian service as much as you think is really in there, and that can be frustrating, it can be just drag you down. You got to learn to stick to it, to endure, to not give up. Look, I'm gonna be faithful at the little things.
If God gives me five dollars to invest, I will invest it, and not complain about why he gave the other guy fifty-five dollars. Thanks for joining us for today's teaching on Cross-Reference 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.
