GOD'S GREAT NEWS for MAN'S GREAT PROBLEM - Romans 1-8

God's Element of Surprise

Today we will speak together about God's element of surprise in our lives. Each of us comes to Christ with a set of passions, often passions that are right and good from an objective Christian perspective. But our passions often crash against Christ's true plan for our lives. When this crash happens, we are faced with a choice: either to accept His wild joy and change course into the brisk wind of His Spirit, or to recoil in a deep sense of frustration and veiled anger over our loss of control.

The first time in my life that my passions crashed into Christ's plan came about four months after I had given my life to Jesus Christ. I was a young and extremely passionate college student, and one legacy my parents had emblazoned on my soul was that a commitment to Jesus Christ was absolute: He became Lord and Master, King of me. So when I committed my life to Christ at a retreat in Tahoe on January 30, 1983, I came back to school ready to dedicate myself wholly to the cause of Jesus Christ. Soon I became involved in the most intense fellowship on campus, known for its wholesale approach to Christianity. My schedule quickly filled, to the point that I was involved in Christian prayer meetings, Bible studies, C. S. Lewis book studies, small group meetings and dorm outreaches up to 40 hours each week. My best friend since the age of five was also my roommate that year in college, and he was tagging along with me to all these meetings, but without having had a personal conversion. We were both in a very tenuous position: he was acting committed in his schedule without being committed in his heart, while I was committed out of my personal passions to live for Christ as a student. After four months of this hyper-intensive commitment, I crashed against something that was very disturbing. I found this fellowship did not believe in the eternal security of the believer, while I firmly believed in it. I began to question all their activity; I saw it was "works" oriented. Grace was never mentioned. I ended up defending the doctrine of eternal security from Romans, and seeking fellowship elsewhere.

This was a period of doubt for me, as it was for my friend. He quit attending the meetings, announcing that he didn't buy Christianity. Never experiencing the life of Christ animating him personally, and observing a fellowship full of misdirected students attempting to copycat Christ in their own strength, he rejected the Christ he never knew but thought he understood. He rejects Him still. My best friend's rejection of Christ added to my doubt. I kept asking the Lord in prayer, "Look, You asked for my life and I gave it to You lock, stock and barrel. I have pursued You to the uttermost: 40 hours a week, for heaven's sake! What more do You want? Why has this thing blown up in my face?" I never felt lonelier in my entire life. My passions to do things for Christ were breaking like waves against the safe harbor of what Christ intended to do through me once I let Him go to work. Thankfully, He kept me praying. We kept talking, He and I, until one day a friend recommended I have lunch with the college pastor at PBC. We had lunch, I was bathed in God's grace and love for those two hours, and by the end of that lunch I could see Christ's plan unveiled before my doubting eyes: He wanted me to hitch myself to this pastor and learn from him. That began 13 years of ministry at PBC: receiving love and teaching as a young student being discipled by the college pastor, and over time, giving love and teaching back to young students as the college pastor of a latter era.

My passions to do things for Christ crashed into Christ's plan to do things through me. The extreme difficulty of situations like these is that my passions seemed to be godly: to exercise total commitment and consecration to Jesus Christ. Isn't that godly? It may have appeared so, but my God's plan was for me to enter into His rest. I was careening into ever-increasing activity; He wanted me to rest that I would be available for His activity in and through me. He didn't want my frenzied activity ... He wanted ME!!! He is so full of surprises. That point of crashing was a critical moment for me: I could have gone the way of my best friend and abandoned the whole thing, or I could have prayed and sought to turn my sails into the new direction His wind was blowing. Thankfully, He moved my hand to the ship's wheel to turn the rudder that my sails would fill with His wind. And His wind has given me joy inexpressible: it has now blown me inland to Greenville, South Carolina, and it is with great joy that I seek to be available to Him that He might love and serve you all through me.

Each person who knows Jesus Christ must gear up for surprise. Our Lord is not a tame Lion, as C. S. Lewis wrote, and I have found Him to be full of the strangest and yet most eternally delightful shockers. His "method of operation" is the element of surprise. Paul was convinced because of his extensive training as a rabbi that Christ would send him as the apostle to the Jews. But Peter the untrained country fisherman was sent to the Jews, while Paul was sent to the Gentiles. C. T. Studd, the famous English cricketer and founding member of the Cambridge Seven team of missionaries, was going to spend his life in China; he was invalided in China and ministered in Africa instead. Jim Elliot's passion was to evangelize the Auca Indians of Ecuador; God's plan was for the Aucas to kill Jim and his friends that all the world would be ministered to by Jim's diaries and the moving writings of his wife. Our dear brother Steve Mitzel set out to be a pastor and do great things for the kingdom of God; but Christ's plan was for Steve to enter the boot camp of suffering that Christ might do greater things through him in binding and healing the hurting and wounded within the kingdom.

This is the curious truth we discover in one of the most personally revealing passages in all of Paul's letters. He writes to the Romans in Rom. 1:8-15 about his passion to come and visit them, issuing forth in his prayer life and even his planning to come; and He was empassioned to preach the gospel among them. But Christ's plan ran far deeper. Even Paul, after three missionary journeys and some twenty years or more in faithful service, experienced the crash of his passions against his Lord's plan. What will it be: Paul's passions, or Christ's plan?

Let's see how all this unfolded in Paul's life. These verses in Rom. 1:8-15 illustrate Paul's statement of his identity in Jesus Christ in Rom. 1:1. We will see Paul here as bond-slave, wanting to visit Rome yet submitting to Christ's plan and His divine timing; we will see Paul here as called apostle, seeking to further establish the church in Rome; and we will see Paul here as a man set apart for the gospel of God, a debt he owes to all the world.

Paul the Bond Slave: Passion for Rome Yielded to His Lord's Plan - Rom. 1:8-10

In these three verses, Paul opens a window to his heart. He tells us about his passion to come and visit this church in Rome in a very creative way: by revealing to us the content of his prayer life in regards to this church in Rome. Paul's prayers for them begin with his characteristic opening note giving him the key around which his chorus of prayer is sung. He begins with the keynote of thanksgiving. Having studied all of Paul's letters this year, it has continually moved me how often Paul's first word in the content of a letter is about how thankful he is for the church or the person to whom he is writing. Paul's first note tells us how thankful he is for the church at Rome: "I thank my God through Jesus Christ concerning you all, because your faith is being proclaimed in all the world."

Paul is a marvelous example to me of the primacy of thanksgiving in our lives. Here is a powerful church leader, a church-planter par excellence, and he is writing to a church that is world renowned for its faith without having had the influence of any apostle. If Paul's ego were not under control, his first thought about this church would not have been thankfulness; it would have been to rush to make sure these upstarts were legitimate. To think that they had the audacity to become a world famous church without the apostolic stamp of approval! But Paul won't have any of that: he marvels at the work His God has done in that church; he delights in the fact that God has sovereignly chosen to plant His own church in the strategic city of Rome. When Paul thinks of that church, he is thrilled at what God is doing, and he thanks God for His work and for their faithful following of His lead. Paul is thankful for these faithful Romans.

Paul tells them that he is thankful "concerning you all," i.e. the church body as a unity, a whole community. This local church was a unified community within the larger and totally pagan community of Rome. Now, if Paul were writing to the American church today, he might say, "I am thankful that your evangelical heroes are heard on radio waves and TV stations around the world; I am thankful for your growing and vibrant music ministries ... but what about the strength of your local churches?" The local church, battered ship though she seems to be at times, still unfurls the flag of the kingdom of God wherever she sails. More than in any other institution and more than through any one individual, the work of God in the world happens through the local church. It can be easy to forget that in these days of evangelical super-heroes and electronic churches on the Internet. Somehow, that fledgling Roman church had gotten it right: they were a unified community of faith in a pagan environment, focusing on their God and loving one another. There in Rome, they stood as one in a hostile community, and their faith had impacted the whole world. May the same be said of Metropolitan, by the grace of God!!

But in addition to being thankful for the Roman church, Paul's prayers have burned with another abiding passion: to travel to Rome, to see this church, to enjoy mutual ministry with the mature believers there. On this theme, Paul has been praying unceasingly, as he tells us in verses 9 and 10: "For God, whom I serve in my spirit in the preaching of the gospel of His Son, is my witness as to how unceasingly I make mention of you, always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you." In these verses you can almost hear the echoes of many hundreds of hours of prayer over the previous years in Paul's life: he has expressed his deep longing to travel to Rome in many places through countless prayers. He says he has prayed "unceasingly:" literally night and day, for years, Paul has prayed that God would send him on a mission to Rome. Paul's passionate longing to see the great city and minister there is especially evident in the final phrase in vs. 10: "... if perhaps now ... at last ... by the will of God ... I may succeed in coming to you."

Yet for all these prayers, for all Paul's passion and his saintly pleas to be allowed to visit Rome, God had not allowed Paul to go to Rome. Even though the church in Rome had had no apostolic assistance that we know of, God did not send Paul there. Even though that church was in an intense and hostile environment where the Jewish population of the city was highly influential and certainly antithetical to the great news about Jesus Christ as the Messiah, God did not send Paul to strengthen them. Even though Paul was the confirmed apostle to the Gentiles and Rome was the unquestioned capital of all things Gentile in the world at that time, God had not sent Paul to Rome. Even though Paul was dying to go to Rome, his passions and his heart desires seeming to be totally aligned with God's calling and purposes in his life, God still did not send Paul to Rome. And Paul must have struggled in his soul with this enigma. Listen to the heartbreaking longing in his words: "if perhaps now ... at long last ... by the will of God ... I may succeed in coming to you."

Paul the great logician must have been stumped by God's logic in this case. In Paul's wisdom and in our missionary zeal it would have seemed like Rome was the FIRST place Paul should have gone to preach. I can just see the vision statement for Paul the Apostle's World Evangelization Mission: "Go to Rome, establish strong churches there, make them hospitable to world travelers coming to Rome, evangelize, convert and disciple these travelers, so that they in turn will carry the gospel to the far corners of the world." Not a shabby vision statement. Not a bad missions program. But it was not God's program. It was not God's plan to send Paul to Rome, for all the ten years previous during Paul's three missionary journeys.

This is where our faith gets tested. I was sitting at lunch down at Ruby Tuesday's with a new Greenville friend of mine two weeks ago. He was sitting there shaking his head about something he simply could not understand. He had been praying for years for a very gifted friend of his in the ministry. His friend was a walking bundle of potential: very gifted with people, very loving, very strong public-speaking gifts. And yet God had chosen to afflict his friend very deeply with a debilitating sickness. This man had been praying one-on-one with his friend for years, and in his mind God has not restored his friend's ministry to where this man hoped it to be. He sat there at lunch, shaking his head, saying, "I will never understand why the Lord won't set him free for a broader-based ministry." I listened to this faithful prayer warrior lament at the seeming silence of his commander-in-chief. When even our prayers don't seem to open doors, we begin to get discouraged that those doors will never open.

But the trick at this crucial phase is to KEEP ON PRAYING!! That is exactly what Paul did: he prayed unceasingly, without giving in to discouragement. It is not as though God does not have great things planned; it is just that our eyes are so limited in seeing the grand scope, the extra dimensions, of His ministry efforts. We struggle deeply when God does not do things our way, especially if we have prayed along our direction for a long time. This is a classic case of our passions crashing into Christ's plans. At the moment of impact, we will either submit in humility to His better wisdom and vision, or we will slowly become hardened at a God who seems not to listen, who keeps all the control and seems impervious to our prayers and our passions. And if we are honest, at that point we get deeply angry at God. That is a dangerous and difficult place to be. The only way that our hearts will remain soft is to keep on praying: maybe our passions are not His, and our passions need to be yielded that He may open our eyes to His greater passions for us for the work He wants to achieve through us. His plans nearly always astonish us anyway: why are we always seeking to know them ahead of time? It is far more satisfying to know Him, and enjoy Him, than it is to merely know His plans. He would rather walk with us through the dark valleys than merely give us a map and send us on our way alone.

But His ways are always surprising; sometimes even humorous. I was reading a short biography this week about a man named Paul White. He became a Christian at a revival meeting in Australia, then studied to become a doctor. His passion was to become a missionary doctor in Africa. Just before taking his final medical examinations that would make him a Doctor, he asked a girl named Mary to be his wife. Two years later they were married and a year after that they went to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in Africa to be medical missionaries. But then the crash occurred between Paul White's passion and Christ's plan. His wife Mary was bed-ridden with a terrible illness for eight months. Then Paul's own problem of asthma weakened him terribly, so much so that his orderlies had to wheel him from his home to the hospital in a wheel barrow. The great missionary doctor was now little more than a sick patient. Soon his replacement came. His wife was miraculously healed. Paul was deeply refreshed. Everything seemed to be getting back on schedule. Then they went home on furlough, and another crash occurred. Paul developed a boil on his bottom, making it painful for him even to walk. Once again, missionary doctoring was out of the question. All he could do was sit in a special chair with a hole cut out of the seat. Sitting in that chair, afflicted like Job, all his plans dashed again, Paul White began to write. This launched a fifty-year writing ministry, where his Jungle Doctor adventure series and some eighty other titles have shared truths about Christ in nearly ninety languages. Sometimes God has to put a boil on a strategic place to slow us down enough so that His plans can be established when our passions seem to get in the way!

In these verses, we see Paul as bond-slave of Jesus Christ: he prays about this church, he yearns with great feeling to visit them, yet he steadfastly obeys his Master, submitting to his Lord. He will go or stay only at Jesus Christ's bidding. This is Paul the bond-slave of Jesus Christ.

Paul the Called Apostle: Looking to Establish the Roman Church - Rom. 1:11-13

But not only do we see Paul the bond-slave of Jesus Christ in vs. 8-10, we see Paul the called apostle in vs. 11-13. In these verses, we see the first of two primary reasons why Paul wanted to journey to Rome so badly. Paul wanted to come and live and serve and shepherd this body of believers in Rome. He knew that his spiritual gift as an apostle would make him a special gift from God to them, establishing them further in their faith and their church life. This was Paul's role as an apostle among the Gentile churches, as he had exhibited throughout the Gentile world in Ephesus, Corinth, Phillipi, Thessalonica, Iconium, etc. He writes to them in vs. 11-13: "For I long to see you in order that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established; that is, that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other's faith, both yours and mine. But I wish you not to be ignorant, brethren, that often I planned to come to you, and was hindered until the present, so that I may have some fruit also among you just as also among the rest of the Gentiles." Paul's passion in this case was to see the Roman church fully established in steady maturity in Christ Jesus.

But how was Paul going to be used of God in establishing the church? By the use of his spiritual gift: "For I long to see you in order that I may impart some spiritual gift to you." The "spiritual gift" he speaks of in verse 11 is in the singular, so he is not there to dispense "spiritual gifts" as only the Holy Spirit can. Instead, I believe Paul rightly saw himself as the gifted apostle appointed by God to establish churches in the Gentile regions. His self-knowledge came from knowing Christ, and knowing how Christ had wired him together for ministry. Paul was clear but humble about the great gifts poured into him by the Spirit of Christ in him. Paul yearned to go to the center of the Gentile world in Rome, and live in community with these dear believers. His hope was that they would be mutually encouraged by each others' faith through the whole process.

Paul's humility shines through graciously in verse 12 when he emphasizes how much he wants to serve and fit into their community. He has no desire to come in as God's "hired gun," to shoot from the hip and ride off into the sunset, leaving them to bury the dead and settle the dust. Instead, he has been praying for and looking for opportunities to encourage them. And in his humility he has learned that ministry among the called of God is never a one-way street: the love, spiritual gifts, and encouragement flow both ways from believer to believer in the symbiotic ministry of the Spirit of God. I use the word "symbiotic" because it comes from two Greek words meaning "life ... together." Paul hoped they would share Christ's life ... together, with encouragement flowing freely to all.

This verse means a great deal to me, since it was bubbling in my heart when I wrote the announcement to you stating that I had accepted your invitation to come to Metropolitan on Christmas Eve day last year. In that annoucement, I wrote to you these words, hoping to have the same heart and humble spirit Paul had in writing to the Romans:

It is with great joy in my heart that I accept your call to come and pastor-teach at metropolitan baptist church. i am absolutely convinced that our lord jesus christ has called me to you, and you to me, that together we may share the gifts of his spirit as one body. I will be moving out with my family by the end of May, lord willing, and will begin preaching through the book of romans on Sunday, June 2...

May we rejoice together this christmas. two thousand years ago god gave us the supreme gift of his son on the first christmas. today he gives us the great gift of his son in each other, in each of you and in me and mine!! May we grow together into maturity in him over the years ahead, loving Him and praising him together!!

In fact, now that I am here, I have already been overwhelmingly blessed with our life together. Each of you have been a blessing to me, in at least two ways. First, I am a lover of poetry. One whole shelf in my office is dedicated to poetry. I love the sheer artistry, the focused imagery, the living beauty of our language cast into poetic form. I try lamely to write poetry, and I love to read really good poetry. But our creative Lord has given me more than just a dusty shelf of poems to read. According to Eph. 2:10, each one of us is "His workmanship." In Greek, the word is "poiema," from which we get the English word "poem." In other words, each of you is a poem written by the hand of our God, and He has set before me the piercingly beautiful task of listening to you, praying for you, asking God to open my eyes to see His themes, His truths, His creativity, His beauty woven into the meter, rhyme and metaphor of your lives. You are a gift to me in the poetry of your lives.

The second way you are all a gift to me has come through our Wednesday night prayer meetings. We are a praying people at this church, and I am thrilled to be called to serve among a praying people. We may have many needs in our midst, and many areas of ministry that need to be addressed, but we are a praying people. This has answered many an agonizing desire of my soul. As one of my favorite authors, Henri Nouwen, has said in his book entitled Compassion, "We are able to do many hard things, tolerate many conflicts, overcome many obstacles, and persevere under many pressures, but when we no longer experience ourselves as part of a caring, supporting, praying community, we quickly lose faith. That is because faith in God's compassionate presence can never be separated from experiencing God's presence in the community to which we belong. The crises in the lives of many caring Christians today are closely connected with deep feelings of not belonging. Without a sense of being sent by a caring community, a compassionate life cannot last lng and quickly degenerates into a life marked by numbness and anger. This is not simply a psychological observation, but a theological truth, because apart from a vital relationship with a caring community a vital relationship with Christ is not possible." We are so blessed to have such a community, a praying community, a caring community.

Paul had been yearning to visit them; he had been burdened to love them according to his spiritual gifting as a called apostle; he hoped to be used of God in further establishing them in the maturity of a body unified in Christ Jesus; and he eagerly anticipated their life together as a season of mutual encouragement for all.

In fact, by verse 13, we see how Paul's passion to visit them and experience all this richness of the life of Christ together with them had actually crossed over into the planning stage. Paul tells them, "But I wish you not to be ignorant, brethren, that often I planned to come to you, and was hindered until the present, so that I may have some fruit also among you just as also among the rest of the Gentiles." Paul's passion had given birth to specific plans to visit them ... but each of the plans were thwarted. Again, Paul passions and even his self-made plans had crashed against Christ's plans. We see in vs. 13 the surprising nature of God's plan working mysteriously beyond the passion and planning of Paul the Apostle. Just why didn't God send Paul to Rome? It seems that even the passions and plan of a called apostle were different than the mysterious and surprising plan of Jesus Christ.

Paul Set Apart for the Gospel: Owing a Debt to the World - Rom. 1:13-15

In these final two verses in this passage, we see Paul as a man entirely set apart for the great news of God. Here we see another side of Paul's passion to travel to Rome: his first desire was to travel there as a called apostle to establish their church, but his second desire was to travel to Rome to preach the great news to any and all who would hear, as a man set apart for the great news of God. Paul's passionate heart must have dreamed night after night about the possibilities of preaching in the great Forum in Rome; his mind must have filled with visions of preaching to a multinational and multicultural audience in the heart of the Empire. But like all great evangelists, he wanted to go to Rome not for his own sake, nor for any glory which might accrue to him, but because of a deep and abiding debt of love for the lost people who would hear his great news. Paul bore a debt, something he owed to the Gentiles of every stripe and every nationality. He wanted to travel to Rome for their sakes, that they might hear this greatest news any human will ever hear. His heart must have been breaking daily at the seemingly lost opportunities that passed him by each day he was not preaching in the open and rarified air of Rome.

Paul tells them in vs. 14, 15: "I am one who owes a debt, both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. Thus, for my part, I am eager to preach the great news to you also who are in Rome."

Paul begins verse 14 with a solemn self-description: literally, "I am one who owes a debt." This is a fascinating way for Paul to describe himself. First, in verse 1, he was a bond-slave, a called apostle, set apart for God's great news. Now, he is one who owes a debt to all Gentiles, regardless of whether they are cultured or uncultured, educated or uneducated, classic or unclassifiable. In fact, Paul says he owed a debt to the whole of the Gentile world, expressed in two parallel totalities: both to Greeks (i.e. those highly cultured ones in the Graeco-Roman world who spoke Greek properly), and to Barbarians (literally those who did not speak Greek properly and had their own unintelligible speech, who were thus viewed as uncultured). Paul also says he owed a debt to the wise ones, such as the Greeks of Athens or Rome who would debate lofty philosophical ideals, as well as to the foolish men whose sights were trained no further than on where they were going to scrounge their next meal. For us today, maybe Paul would have said "I am one who owes a debt, both to those with Ph.D.'s and those who never finished high school." At any rate, Paul is "one who owes a debt to both," i.e. to the totality of the Gentile world. But in what way does he owe them a debt?

Basically, there are two ways of being in debt to someone. First, you can be in debt to someone by borrowing money from them. This clearly was not the case to which Paul refers. Second, you can be entrusted to convey some gift or some message from one person to another. In this case, you are indebted to the person for whom the gift or message was intended. This was exactly Paul's case as the man conveying the financial gift from the churches in Asia Minor intended for the church in Jerusalem. He literally "owed a debt" to the Jerusalem church, the monetary gifts of brothers and sisters in the churches to the north, which he was very eager to deliver in order to fulfill the trust of the Gentile churches. Similarly, God had entrusted to Paul the greatest news the world had ever heard, which God intended for the Gentile masses to hear, regardless of, race, culture, creed, etc. That message was FROM GOD, ENTRUSTED TO PAUL ... BUT IT BELONGED TO THE GENTILES!! Small wonder Paul's heart and mind burned with a desire to preach this great news to any Gentile who would listen, and thus give to them God's specific treasure meant especially for them.

To illustrate this, let me draw for you the following scenario in modern-day terms, so we can better grasp the intensity of Paul's passion to come to preach the great news in Rome. We all know how awful the AIDS epidemic is, especially in some of the African countries where whole generations may be wiped out by it. But imagine if you can an even worse epidemic, literally infecting every single human on the face of the earth, a malady so awful that its symptoms include hardening of the heart, dimming of the eyes, stopping up of the ears, numbing of the feelings, and scrambling of our thought processes. It is both a totally debilitating disease and a terminal one. Literally everyone in the world has it. Such a disease would be an unspeakable terror, haunting humanity.

Yet you happen to be one of the lucky ones, whose disease seems to be in remission for the moment. Then, one day while you are minding your own business, Jesus Christ knocks on your door as the Great Physician, and gives you a little scroll. This scroll contains a prescription that not only describes the disease in great detail, but offers a profoundly simple cure that wipes out the disease and restores new life, in fact life eternal, to the sufferer. Jesus then solemnly tells you that you must take that scroll and read it aloud and explain it to the entire world, because that world is dying from within, and the scroll is not just meant for you but it actually belongs to the masses. Then Jesus also tells you that you can only go where He tells you to go. So, you embark on this mission. Can you even imagine how focused you would become, how much you would talk with Jesus to find out where to go next, how passionate you would become in proclaiming this message?

Now, this scene is NOT something to be imagined: it is absolute reality from God's perspective. This is exactly what drove Paul, because this "scroll" of great news revealed to him in the Person of his risen Christ on the Damascus road is indeed the Great Physician's prescription and cure for the terrible disease of sin afflicting all humanity. Now, let's take this one step further. Today we are the ones with the scroll ... in fact this very moment we are reading and studying Romans 1-8, which is the scroll containing the description of the disease of sin and God's great news of healing through faith in Christ who became our sin that we might become part of His life. May we become as full of passion about proclaiming that message as our older brother Paul, in the power and passion of the Holy Spirit!!

Paul concludes this section in verse 15, saying "Thus, as for me, I am eager to proclaim God's great news to you also who are in Rome." Paul's three words "I am eager ..." in this verse stand as a great indictment of most Christians I know, including myself a good part of the time. Paul stands boldly and says, "As for me, I am eager to proclaim God's great news to you also who are in Rome." This reminds me of Patrick Henry's famous speech, "As for me, give me liberty or give me death!" Paul's passion was every bit as great in the cause of the gospel of God as was Patrick Henry's fiery passion in the cause of liberty. Paul's passion rings with these words, "As for me, I am eager to proclaim God's great news to you also who are in Rome."

Paul stands before us in history as the direct opposite of the American church today. We are EVERYTHING BUT eager to preach the gospel. We instead like to hem and haw, not make waves, show by example but rarely by word, and we are mealy-mouthed at best at proclaiming the great news we believe in and are committed to. We have to ask ourselves, why are we everything but eager to share our faith? If you find yourself often timid, we will speak of that in our study of Rom. 1:16, 17.

So, we have seen Paul as bond-slave of Jesus Christ, with a passion to visit Rome, yielded in submission to his Lord and Master. We have seen Paul with all the passion of a called apostle, hoping to arrive in Rome and be used of God to further establish that church in the full maturity of Jesus Christ. And we have seen Paul as an empassioned messenger, a man totally set apart to bring the great news of God to the Gentile masses, a man hoping against hope to get to preach in the greatest venue of all, the mighty city of Rome!!

But, for some surprising reason, God had thwarted Paul at every turn. Paul's passion has crashed up against Christ's plan. Even Paul's plans to visit Rome had crashed against Christ's plan. Good heavens, just why did God hold back His divinely appointed messenger? What kind of missionary strategist is Jesus Christ anyway? Why was Paul's passion crashing against Christ's plan?

Conclusion -- Oh to See His Better Plan!!

The answer to that question lies right before our eyes, even though it was utterly hidden from Paul's view. Think with me for a minute: the answer lies literally before your very eyes as you study Romans. Look at the title page, consider the history of this book. Do you see it yet?

The answer is simple. The answer can be seen in every word and every verse of the book of Romans. Had Paul been allowed by Jesus Christ to visit Rome previously, he would have preached his heart out. The crowds would have marvelled, and the Roman air would have sparkled for an instant with the mighty proclamation of the great news of God. Then the sparkle would have vanished into history. Had Paul traveled to Rome before 57 AD, only the Romans would have heard the great news he so masterfully set down in Romans 1-8. But because Jesus Christ forbade him to visit Rome, because Jesus Christ seemed to turn a deaf ear to all of Paul's prayerful and passionate prayers that he might go to Rome, Paul found himself sitting in a chair in Gaius' house in the city of Corinth in the winter of 57 AD, painstakingly writing out the most logical and compelling presentation of the great news of Jesus Christ in the history of the world. Had Paul not written this letter, perhaps St. Augustine would never have read that scroll that day in the garden and come to Christ. Had these words never been penned, Martin Luther might not have been led to discover the truths that fueled the Reformation. Had Paul visited Rome and not written this letter, there would never have been the book of Romans to feed the faith and fire the imagination of each generation of believers from that day to this.

Paul had in mind the revival of Rome and the converts of his day; Jesus Christ had in mind the revival of many cities and countries, winning converts the world over, for some two thousand years. Paul's vision was limited, and consequently so were his prayers. How could he know when his passion crashed against Christ's plan, that Christ's plan was far greater than anything even Paul's passionate mind could envision?

Oh that each of us might seize this precious truth, and yield our passions to the mighty plan of our Christ for our lives, that He might have full rein to live out His life through us in whichever way He pleases. May we not grow weary when our passionate prayers for our lives or the lives of others seem to go unheeded: let's keep praying, and yielding, and letting our Lord Jesus Christ fulfill His grand vision and plan in our lives and the lives of our dearly beloved. And may we not underestimate these short passages filled with personal notes and details as if they were unimportant: in this case, this passage addresses one of the central struggles and glorious truths of our Christian faith.

Oh my Lord, may the truth of this message sink to the deepest depths of our souls, and may it soften our hearts in Your hands, making us utterly and constantly available to be used by You, any time, anywhere, in any way. May You be praised forever for the grandeur of Your plan, and may You focus our passions unto the good works You have foreordained for us to walk into!!! Amen and amen!

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