Three Perspectives . . . One Passion

Isaiah's perspective on life was that he was willing and eager to serve and be used by God. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Then I said, Here am I, send me. See, what happens when you have a sense of indebtedness to God for forgiving you of your sin, eagerness to deliver the news?

Who will go for us? The triune God shouted and Isaiah said, Oh, let it be me. Have you ever felt like you owe something to someone?

Maybe a favor, maybe an apology or maybe just your time? Well, imagine living every day knowing you owe your very life to God and to the people around you. That's how the Apostle Paul saw his life. In today's message, you'll hear about three powerful statements Paul made about himself in Romans that reveal his sense of obligation, eagerness and boldness in sharing the gospel. We'll explore how his sense of debt to Christ shaped everything he did.

Keep listening to learn how to live with purpose. A gem dealer was strolling along the aisles of the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show a few years ago when he noticed in one particular bin at a vendor's table a blue violet stone, the size and shape of a potato. He picked it up and looked it over and then as calmly as he could said to the vendor at this particular table, So would you take $15 for it? And that particular vendor said, Now, it isn't as pretty as some of the others I know. You can have it for 10 bucks. That stone has since been certified as a 1900 carat natural star sapphire, about 800 carats larger than the previous largest star sapphire.

It was appraised for $2.2 million. Don't go running the gem shows out there. You won't know what to look for.

Neither would I. You have to be somebody who knows what to look for to recognize the value of something like that. You have to have eyes to see what no one else yet has seen. In Romans Chapter one, we are given a brief yet very powerful account of the apostle Paul and how he looked at people and how he looked at life and how he looked at the church and how he looked at God. And it isn't long before you discover that he looked at life with different eyes than most others. He looked at rough-cut people with a different perspective, and he saw his relationship to Christ differently. Frankly put, Paul lived with forever in mind.

That is, he seized life as it were, an undiscovered sapphire. And in a rather rare autobiographical moment, Paul says about three things about himself, and so doing, he reveals his perspective that caused him to see life with a different purpose. Look at Chapter one, and let's pick up where we left off with verse 14, where Paul gives us the first of three self-describing statements. He writes, I am under obligation. Perhaps translated in your text, I am indebted, both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. In other words, his first statement is, I am indebted. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a life-changing, life-altering statement to believe, much less to say. For him, living for Jesus Christ was not an option.

It was an obligation, it was a debt, and he considered himself deeply indebted to God. Perhaps you have come here this morning and you have been mulling over in your mind your own financial debt. Maybe you have been churning away and planning inside of how to get out of financial debt. Maybe you owe this creditor or that oil company or that organization or that university or that department store. Maybe you are musing over and thinking and planning as to how you can get ahead of the interest on your debt or maybe how you can erase your mortgage a few years ahead of the schedule. Maybe you are simply wondering how to make the next mortgage a payment. The average American I have read is between $5,000 and $7,000 in credit card debt.

The average community household in our city spends on automobiles and automobile insurance nearly $1,000 a month. People are struggling over the fact that they are deeply in debt, and Paul saw life like that. He is at times in his letters almost weighed down by the debt that he feels. Only the debt that he thought about and mused over and planned to pay was the fact that he was deeply in debt to God and to others. In fact, if you take his letters and compare several passages of Scripture, it reveals the indebtedness of the believer in at least three areas. Number one, every Christian is indeed indebted to Jesus Christ. Paul wrote to the Corinthian believers, Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, that you are not of your own? For you have been bought with a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body.

1 Corinthians 6, 19, and 20. Paul takes you by way of imagination to the center of the town or village where they are auctioning slaves. And there you are, and you're on the auction block, and there are people bidding for your life. And then, as it were, at the last moment, Jesus Christ steps forward with the payment in hand that outbids everyone else, and he pays the price, and you become his slave. You belong to him.

You now live for him. And you can say with full understanding the words of Micah, who quoted God himself as he spoke to his children, saying, I have ransomed you out of the house of slavery. This is what Paul meant in Ephesians chapter 6, verse 6, when he said, We are the slaves of Christ, and we do the will of God from our hearts. We had better get it right.

We had better see life differently than most. Jesus Christ does not owe us anything. We owe him everything. Jesus paid it all. All to him I owe. Sin had left that crimson stain.

He washed it white as snow. We are indebted to the one who redeemed us off the auction block of slavery and himself. That's not all of your debts.

There's a second one. Every Christian is indebted to the church, the body of believers. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul talks about everyone fitting into the body with some particular resource or spiritual gifting.

They have a ministry that they are to invest in the lives of other believers. In 1 Peter 4, 8, above all, he writes, Keep fervent in your love for one another because love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaint as each one has received a special gift. Employ it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God. Whoever speaks is to do so as one who is speaking the utterances of God.

Whoever serves is to do so as one who is serving by the strength of which God supplies so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. In other words, every Christian has received at least one gift by God, and you're supposed to deposit by life payments. Deposits of that gift in the body of Christ.

You've received a gift from God, but it does not belong to you. It belongs to this assembly, this local manifestation of the body of Christ. How are you, by the way, at paying that debt to those you worship with? As you make your payments to the body in the form of spiritual ministry utilizing your gifts, you then, he says, serve as good stewards in the manifold grace of God. Third, every Christian has a debt to pay to the world. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 9 and 16, for if I preach or deliver the gospel, I have nothing to boast of, for I am under compulsion.

There's that sense of indebtedness. For woe is me if I do not fulfill my function, he says in preaching the gospel, for though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all so that I may win more. Paul says, I am a free man in Christ, but then again, I'm not a free man.

I'm not free because I have made myself a slave to all in order that I may win some. I am indebted to humanity so that I might win some to Christ. Paul specifically refers to that kind of debt in verse 14 of Romans 1. Look back there, I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise.

Literally, I am a debtor. I am indebted both to Greeks and to barbarians. These are parallel phrases, grammatical merism. That is, the second phrase simply repeats the thought of the first phrase. He just chooses different words to say basically the same thing for the sake of emphasis. He is saying here that he is indebted, first of all, to those who spoke Greek, which is his empire and world, and those who didn't. He called them barbarians.

That was not so much a slam in his day. The word simply came from those who spoke a language no one could understand, at least in his empire. They just seemed to say bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, and so they gave them the name barbarians. In other words, he is indebted to all speaking beings. He then repeats the thought and says he's indebted to those who are wise or educated, and those who are unwise that is uneducated. In other words, Paul is indebted to every living human being. The world owes me a living. The world owes me happiness. My family owes me respect. My wife owes me dinner at six. My kids owe me good grades. My boss owes me a promotion, and on and on and on they live as if to say that. In fact, some say it. The truth is, according to the perspective of Paul and anyone who lives with forever in mind, eternity in view, nobody owes you anything.

You owe everybody everything. It's different, isn't it? He saw with different eyes, didn't he? It's not what our culture teaches us. That's not what our fallen, depraved, self-centered natures say as it stamps its feet and demands I wanna get, get, get, get, gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme.

It is part of our nature, our fallen, depraved nature, and it shows up early in life. Have you ever heard a four-year-old say, hey, that's my favorite toy? But you can have it.

No, I don't think so. We grown-ups who grow old in Christ but perhaps not up in Christ, and there is a difference between growing old in him and up in him. Think about what we can get from God and what we can get from the church and what we can get from the world, and we say to the Lord prayers that are nothing more than gimme prayers, Lord, gimme this and gimme that and gimme this and gimme that, and we say to the church, well, I'll go to that church if it'll provide this and provide that and do this for me and do that for me, and we say to the world, that's mine, that's all mine. Stay away and give me more. Paul thought in terms of not what he could get but what he could give.

He looked at life with an unusual perspective. He said, I am deeply in debt. I am in debt to God through Christ. I am in debt to the church that I must invest my spiritual gift in, and I am a debtor to the world that has never heard the gospel. Paul says another thing about himself in verse 15, thus for my part I am eager to deliver the gospel to you, to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. Now, if Paul hadn't put in this phrase, we might have gotten the idea that his shoulders were drooping and his head was down and he was saying, well, I guess I have to deliver the gospel because I have this sense of indebtedness to the world and know how miserable I am. No, no, no, no. That's why I think he adds, oh, but I want you to know I'm eager.

I can't wait. See, the truth is he was passionately excited about delivering the gospel. It wasn't just an obligation.

To him it was sheer satisfaction. He had discovered the fountain of life and he was constantly handing out cups of it to anybody who would reach out. He was always thinking, always dreaming, always planning, always praying.

He's like a man I read about who lived and served the Lord over 100 years ago, Dr. James Niasse Smith. He joined the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts and when he joined the staff, he soon learned they had a problem. With the winter months, they had a hard time gathering groups of young men for those outdoor games because nobody wanted to be outdoors and there wasn't very much they could do indoors and so their crowds would drop off and those whom they could preach and deliver the gospel to diminished and so he thought and he thought and he thought, what could we do? And on December 21st, 1891, he came up with an idea to create a game for indoors. He asked the janitor to find two sturdy boxes that could be attached to opposite walls.

The janitor looked and couldn't find any, but what he did find were two peach baskets. Niasse Smith told him to put them on the walls about 10 feet high and they knocked the bottoms out and he got a soccer ball and he sat down and made 13 rules rather quickly and thus began a game because they were putting the ball through a peach basket. He named it. Basketball. You're extremely clever this morning.

I tried to hold off and give you any clues until the very end. Basketball. The crowds were drawn to the game and they won many young men to Christ and of course, since that day, it still draws a crowd, but we don't know if it still has the original intention for when he was interviewed on his inspiration years later, not having patented the game, never having received a dime from it, he said these words. I invented the game to lead young men to Jesus Christ.

Isn't that great? I have in my study a booklet that I have given away 100 times written by a businessman who wanted to get the gospel to his employees and he wasn't a talker, a speaker, rather shy and introspective, but he had an idea. He sat down and he wrote a little booklet out and he called it The Reason Why and he gave little stories of how to seemingly prove that God existed and that Christ loved them from Scripture and just used some logic and good exegesis and put the book together and gave it to his employees for Christmas one year and many came to faith. That little booklet has been printed now more than 25 million times over and in 30 plus languages.

Now I use those rather intimidating illustrations knowing that probably none of us are gonna invent an international sport and none of us are probably gonna be published 25 million times over in 30 languages, but that's not the point. The breadth of our message and the depth and context of how we deliver the message is all up to God. We are simply faithful to deliver it.

It may be delivering it to one child, just a group of children or teenagers or maybe one adult you carpool with or maybe one student or one faculty member and beyond that it's up to God. The believer is under obligation. Do you live with that sense that you must?

If you have that sense of obligation, there will come that accompanying sense of desire. Isaiah tells his own personal story in a familiar passage, but as I read this again to you, I want you to listen with a little different ears. I want you to listen to his story that talks about his gratitude and indebtedness to God for forgiveness and then the eagerness that came, okay? In the sixth chapter, he writes, in the year of King Uzziah's death, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne lofty and exalted with the train of his robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above him, each having six wings with two.

He covered his face with two. He covered his feet and with two he flew and one called out to another and said continually, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory and the foundation of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out while the temple was filling with smoke. Then I said, woe is me for I am ruined because I am a man of unclean, sinful lips and I live among a people of sinful lips for my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts. Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a burning coal in his hand which he had taken from the altar with tongs. He touched my mouth with it and said, behold, this has touched your lips and your iniquity is taken away and your sin is forgiven. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, whom shall I send and who will go for us? Then I said, here am I.

Send me. See, what happens when you have a sense of indebtedness to God for forgiving you of your sin? Comes this accompanying sense of eagerness to deliver the news.

Who will go for us? The triune God shouted and Isaiah said, oh, let it be me. One more thing Paul says about himself in Romans one. He has told us he was indebted, he was eager and now notice verse 16, for I am not ashamed of the gospel.

You know, a lot of times we try to get people to reach that point first. Don't be ashamed, don't be ashamed, don't be ashamed. Well, you know why they're ashamed?

Because they don't have a sense of indebtedness which produces eagerness. But those who have that sense of indebtedness to God and to the world and eagerness then they're not ashamed. Now maybe somebody in Rome would hear Paul writing or they'd read it and he says I'm eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome and they'd think of themselves Rome. You wanna come to Rome? Has anybody ever told you about Rome, Paul?

This is a place that would despise some gospel story of a felon who supposedly rose from the dead. This is the high-minded society. This is the intellectual hub of the empire. This is the greatest city of the greatest empire on earth, not to mention the most pagan, immoral, perhaps square footage in all of the kingdom. Besides, Paul, they worship Nero here. They burn their incense to Caesar and they claim that Caesar is king.

They're not gonna think too highly of you. Perhaps Paul was thinking of David's words in Psalm 119, 46. I will speak thy testimonies before kings and I will not be ashamed. I couldn't help but think of this as I listened with amazement and troubled spirit to a political appointee over these last few days before a Senate confirmation committee and get lambasted and ridiculed and questioned, pummeled by the media, considered a flake, a fanatic, a weirdo, why? Because he had some immoral skeleton in his closet? Because he was a member of some strange aberration, some cult?

No, because he made the statement in a speech a few years ago, there is no king but Jesus. But I thought one recently defeated vice presidential candidate mentioned God all the time. His prayers, I saw them printed in the news and observer. It was all positive, the darling of the media.

His religion was a badge of honor and everybody was trumpeting his character and besides, the leaders at times like this always talk about God, God bless America and God bless this and God do this and we trust in God and all of that. It's okay to say something about God. Just don't mention Jesus Christ. Then you've gone over the deep end. Then you're a fanatic. Whatever you do, don't ever even imply that somehow Jesus Christ is sovereign.

You really wanna come to Rome? They're gonna brand you as some strange person. Christianity will be unpopular here. It will be offensive. It will cause scandal.

The cross will be an offense. William R. Newell wrote these very wonderful words Paul was little of stature, we know. He had a weak bodily presence.

His speech or delivery ability was not considered of any account. He said it himself. Yet here is Paul utterly weak in himself and with his own physical thorn yet ready, eager to go to Rome and to preach what? A Christ that the Jewish nation had themselves rejected. A Christ who had been despised and crucified by Roman soldiers at the order of a Roman governor. Talk of your brave men, oh world. Where in history can you find one like Paul?

Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon marched with the protection of their armies to enforce their will upon men. But Paul marched with Christ to the center of this world's greatness into an empire which shook the world with nothing less or more than Christ alone. And here comes Paul and he says before he ever gets there, I am not ashamed of the gospel. What about you? Are you ashamed? Are you ashamed to bow your head in the cafeteria or in the restaurant to thank your Lord for your food? Are you ashamed to tell anybody that you are in church today?

Are you ashamed to carry your Bible around, to put it on your desk? Jesus Christ delivered some haunting words at one point when he said, whoever is ashamed of me and my words, I will be ashamed of him. When I come in the glory of my Father with the holy angels, I don't want to stand before him and have him be ashamed of me to you. Paul wrote years later to his son in the faith Timothy, therefore do not be ashamed of the testimony of our Lord or of me as prisoner, but join with me in suffering for the gospel according to the power of God who has saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity.

For this reason I also suffer these things, but I am not ashamed. Paul, why are you not ashamed? He goes on, because I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to keep that which I've committed to him against that day. What is that day, Paul?

That day is when we see him face to face. You see, Paul saw the future, and so he saw the present with different eyes. Because he saw people differently, he lived differently, and most others would see lumps of rock worth a handful of coins. So Paul saw star sapphires fit for the crown of his king.

What do you see? If we took the statistics of missions organizations as to how many people are churched and how many people are unchurched, and by that how many are redeemed and how many aren't redeemed, of course we know that isn't necessarily a connection, and religious organizations tend to lump everybody into that Christian term. If they believe in Trinitarianism then they're lumped in too, and so I think the numbers are inflated, but even with the numbers they provide, just the population growth alone. Between last Sunday when you left here and this Sunday morning when you showed up, more than a million people were born, about 138,000 every day.

You add those unredeemed to the unredeemed of the world, and if you were to put them in a line, a single file line, it would stretch around the world eight times. If you could get into your car and drive 60 miles an hour, 10 hours a day, and never stop, even though you wouldn't be able to hardly focus on a face, you'd be driving by so fast, but if you could just drive past all of those people in that line, never stopping 10 hours a day, 60 miles an hour, it would still take you nearly five years just to drive past. Would you drive around town? What do you see?

Would you go to the mall? What do you see? When you go to that sporting event, what do you see?

When you go to school on that campus, what do you see? Paul would have seen people to whom he owed everything. You see, my friends, he lived an obligated life that was ready and eager and unashamed of the gospel of the soon-coming king of kings and lord of lords, and he lived for the day when he would see that king face to face, and he lived in light of that coming day. That's another way of saying, Paul lived with forever on his mind, and that determined the way he lived in the present. He was indebted.

He was eager, and he was unashamed. That was Stephen Davey, and this is Wisdom for the Heart. Today's message is called Three Perspectives, One Passion. If you haven't already signed up for Friends of Wisdom, I'd like to invite you to do so today. Each week, you'll receive an email from Stephen with biblical encouragement that will help you to be a part of your life. If you haven't already signed up for Friends of Wisdom, I'd like to invite you to do so today. You'll receive biblical encouragement, answers to pressing Bible questions, and helpful insight on living wisely. Many of the questions Stephen answers are ones you might be asking yourself, making his responses even more personal and relevant. Plus, each month, you'll receive a free resource designed to deepen your understanding of Scripture.

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