The Letter to the Romans: Message #9 – Chapter 15

The other is to suffer the cross of Christ in your life; to accept an absolutely witchy husband as the will of God in your life. If he is still here in the church, slugging it out with you, go get help and advice from somebody in the church. Don’t just sit there and suffer pain. If you get married and you’ve never consummated your marriage, it’s time to let somebody know, you dumb Dodo. If you’ve got a problem, get it out in the open. My cow! Does sunlight go in one ear and come out the other? We ought to be able to recognize needs. We need to turn to the body of Christ for our help. We do not keep these things secret. If you have a latent desire to dress up like a female or dress like a male, for pity’s sake, go tell somebody and get some help. If you have this overwhelming desire to steal a Trans Am… only a Trans Am…only a 1988 Trans Am…get it in the light for pity’s sake. Learn what it means to go to the cross and go there, and when you absolutely can’t, ask the Lord to send it back again and give you a second chance at it, and to suffer the cross rather than blaming the world, God, and your fellow believer. To know all that there can be known about going to the cross, but you know, if you’re going to learn everything there is to know about knowing the cross, then you’ve got to know that your deceptive heart will use the cross to get out of the cross: Well, sweetheart, what’s your problem? “My husband is my problem. He won’t talk to me.” Alright, brother, what’s your problem? “Oh, I’m going to the cross with my wife.” What are you doing? “I’m just sitting here being quiet. I’m not judging her. I don’t talk to her. I’m just going through the suffering and agonies of the cross.” I look at him, I want to choke him and say, “You nitwit, you have been quiet and silent your entire life. That is the way you work and operate, and your wife is dying from lack of communication, and you’re calling that the cross? Buster, that’s your habitat. Your cross would be to talk.

Did you follow that? Oh, there is so much deception in our hearts, and we all need help, and that’s what the body of Christ is here for. There’s always somebody around here who can give you a little insight. And if you are a husband and you are a wife and you are hurting, go to somebody and get some help. And if you are a single brother who is weird on the inside, but nobody knows it? For pity’s sake, let somebody know besides some single brother know that you’re weird inside. And sister, if you happen to be a man-hater with deep-down problems, and you’re in touch with them, find somebody to talk to and let someone help you find the cross in your life.

A brother came and asked the church to ordain him as a single brother for the rest is his life. I refused because, down deep in his heart, he could not handle women. That was going to be no deliverance for him; that was going to be just exactly right down his line, but I will not bring Christian counseling into the church again. That’s going to mean the process will slow down considerably, and there will be a lot more pain and a lot more putting up with one another. Pray for me because I’m going to need it, because I am overcompassionate. I am a person who will get up, throw a ladder up against the cross, get up there with a crowbar, and start pulling nails out of people’s hands, and take them down from the cross, run them to the hospital, pat their hands, their feet, and their heads, and tell them, “You know, we’re so glad you got here just before you expired. We could not stand to see you suffer.” I’m not going to do that anymore, brother. Nobody patted my hand. Well, that’s not true. I got a little help along the way, but the cross has been real in my life again and again and again, and I don’t remember being delivered from it, and I have to get out of the business of delivering brothers and sisters from the cross of Jesus.

Now, I don’t know if you know this or not, but I have brought a very personal testimony to you this evening, but I have also done it for a reason. First of all, I wanted to get it said. This is something new for me. In fact, this is, this is…if I had not made this error in judgment 25 years ago, there’d be twice as many people today walking the earth who knew the Lord well, who are walking with him inside the walls of the church. Twice as many, but I am saying to you tonight here: It is a very, very long walk from here to transformation, and there is a lot of suffering in it. It’s going to take a long time for you to ever get in touch with a few of the motives in your heart, but God has the cross of Christ to get in touch with them, and He also gave you a spirit, and He can speak to that spirit, and He knows your heart. And if you will live in His face, and I doubt that you will ever consistently live in the face of Christ Jesus outside the church, most of us simply do not have the willpower, do you understand me? It is within the body, when the whole body is seeking after Christ, that we each find the strength within the body of Christ to go forward and do this all our lives, as long as we are looking into Him, into his face to behold Him, then there is constant work going on with you, and there is a growing willingness to be worked on by Him. There is a love for Him that is outside of your love for yourself, your personal needs, and your personal comforts.

Therefore, with that, I leave you to Christ and His church, and now I’m going to read the two most important verses in this whole passage. Romans is constructed this way: chapters 1–8 move toward chapter 12, verses 1–2, and Romans 16, 15, 14, and 13 also move toward Romans 12:1–2; all of this is to prepare you for Romans 12:1–2. All of this is about Romans 12:1-2. You move to here; you take Romans 12:1-2 through all of this. Everything we’ve covered this week depends on Romans 12:1-2. When Paul comes to Romans 12:1-2, he knows he’s about to talk for quite a long time about it, but he states it first. I told you I was going to reverse that process, but I doubt if you remember it. Does anyone remember that I said I was going to reverse that process? I have presented to you all these many things, and now I would like, at this time, to gather up all of Romans 1–8 and let it come to its climactic point here, and Romans 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and let them also come to their climactic place.

I’m going to close with this. You were a sinner; you were a Jew; you were a Gentile; you were about to be judged by God and sentenced to judgment. And the courier ran in and said, “Wait a minute, there is another way to be righteous.” Do you remember what I’m talking about? Alright, and then we found that men could be justified by a strange, almost eerie, invisible, vaporistic, mystical thing called faith, rather than all this hard work and all of that stuff. And then we find in Romans 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 the work that God has done to save us, and what He has given us in Christ is incredible. Then he says, Therefore, by all of these mercies, present your bodies to Christ. And he says that to a church.

Now, take all of Romans 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16, put them together, and know all the things you will do in the church, having responded to Romans 12:1, that all of it is made possible through Romans 12:1-2. Beyond Romans 12:1-2 in the church, without Romans 12:1-2, but it is because of Romans 1 through 8 that I am willing to do Romans 12:1-2. I do it because of His great mercies, but then I find out that it’s actually essential that I do it in order to go on, so I guess I’d better read Romans 12, verse 1 and verse 2, and he has just finished the glorious things Christ has done for you. You remember that message: But God is for you. You remember that? Alright, with that in mind: Therefore, I urge you, brothers, because of all those mercies, to take your bodies…now that does not say your body, but as a corporate group of people. Little lady, you do not present your body to Christ. It is almost worthless, as if you’re all alone trying to live the Christian life. To the church in Rome, because God is for you, and all of his marvelous graces, all of you together, present your bodies as a living sacrifice. The church in Rome now, with all the glories that are behind you, and having now looked at all the problems that we are going to face, and all the things we are and all the needs we have, and all the conflicts we are going to have with one another, and all the inner motives that we have in our hearts working against us: Present all of your bodies as a sacrifice, ready to be slaughtered and burned. Yet it will live.

You’re not all going to go to the altar and literally physically die, but go there as though you were about to literally physically die, and give your body as a living sacrifice. Make it a holy sacrifice, a living sacrifice, and make it to God. And that will be your way of responding with worthy worship to all He has done and all He can do.  There is a verse here that’s in I think it’s Romans 14, and it says, Leave the servant alone; God will judge him, and God is able to bring him to where he ought to be, for all that He has done, and for all that’s going to have to take place in your heart to know Him and to know His cross, to gather corporately and present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. That means accepting the cross of Christ into your life now and forever until this world ends.

That means that with your brothers and sisters, you will come and know Him and know him and know Him, and it also means that you’ll do it together. Your sacrifice is corporate, not individual. What lies ahead of you in the Christian life is corporate and not individual. What lies ahead of you is going to be difficult and take a lifetime, but it will be done corporately, and it will be done, for I have offered my life, along with my brothers and sisters, for no other purpose on this earth but to know Him, to worship Him, and to be changed by Him. That I have come to a sober moment in my life when I have said not the world, not sin, but I, with my brothers and sisters, sacrifice the purpose that I might gain on this earth if I were an independent person, I sacrifice that, that I might know His purpose; His will. Not His will for day-to-day how to live, but His will for creation. His will for creation. His will for this universe, His will for His own heart. That which He wants to accomplish to please Himself. I sacrifice my body and my being with my brothers and sisters for Him to work out His eternal will on this earth through us corporately.

I come to this altar, I lay my life down for His will and His purpose, and also that He might be able to work in me in these years left in my life, to work on the inner motives, to deal with all the dastardly, desperate, dark things in me, to expose me to my weaknesses and shortcomings. I have become a living sacrifice on this earth with no other purpose than His eternal will and for His transforming power in my life, throughout the rest of my life.

Now, this passage has its roots in Hebrew practice: before one could walk into the tabernacle or temple, there was an altar there. Whatever you put on there didn’t just get sacrificed; it got burned up. Now, you could not get into the temple; you could not get into the house unless you went through that altar.  Brothers and sisters, I ain’t either, and neither are you. Getting inside that temple and getting inside that house: the entrance is made only through a corporate altar. One of the reasons the Church of Jesus Christ has so many problems is that the altar doesn’t get gone through if you don’t go through it corporately. I want you to try to imagine 50 people who have made themselves a living sacrifice.

I was 17 years old, a senior in college, and a law student. I was a Baptist student, and I belonged to something called the Baptist students. On Wednesday night, the pastor would give the Wednesday night meeting to the Baptist Students, and the Baptist students decided they wanted me to speak. I was one of those Baptist students, and I went through the entire bible from one end to the other, and it was all silent, deaf, and dumb. There were only two verses that I could find; I had never spoken in my life.  The brothers and sisters put up a sign behind me that said, “I will live for Him who died for me.” And there was a pretty little girl sitting right out there. She had just moved there. I was 17 and she was 19. She was a college graduate, and I, 18, I guess. I don’t know if I was 17 or 18. Anyway, my wife heard me preach the first sermon that I ever preached. I preached on Romans 12:1-2. That verse was too big for me. I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I did recognize that night that there was something in that verse that demanded my willingness to total annihilation while yet breathing. I’m not talking about martyrdom here. And that grew. Many times, I have come to give Him my life on the basis of Romans 12:1-2, but one day I heard a brother speak about it the way I’m speaking to you, and I got it really clear what it was. I was in Altadena, California, and I walked out in front of the…and I had already done this, but I did it this time in the full light of the revelation of that verse. I sat there on that front porch, and I told the Lord that I gave Him my life, that I would know His cross. Told Him that I would make this my permanent offering, that I would not come down from that altar. By His grace, I would not come down. I don’t have the strength to do that. It’s interesting, He, if He ever gets you that far, brother, and it’s really real, sister, then He’ll make sure you can’t get off that cross when you’re hollering and screaming to come down. The cross will suddenly become a part of your life.