The Letter to the Romans: Message #7 – Chapter 13

…of Romans 13, verse 1 through 7. I really don’t feel that you today need this. Maybe the people in Rome did; a sense that all government was unfair, and they had real good reasons for believing that. There was so much unfairness in government in those days. I don’t think you can appreciate this fact, but the only people who really had laws to protect them were the influential. If there were a horde of barbarians giving a hard time to a town, as long as those barbarians were beating up and stealing from the poor, there’s no chance the Roman army would come in there and do anything about it. It wasn’t until those barbarians hit the upper middle class, the authorities, or the rich that they complained, then they had the protection of the Roman Empire. So, there was a lot of that going on. I realize there’s a little of that going on today. Nonetheless, do I have to tell you, brothers, to render taxes to whom taxes are due, fear to whom fear is due, and honor to whom honor? I think I do, probably to one or two or three of you, but I think most of you understand that those people are there as an instrument of God to protect you. Would you not agree that that’s true? And that the only people who should fear are those who are breaking the laws; continually breaking the law, and some of you have done that. Where did you end up? Yeah, at least before a judge, didn’t you?

Well, let’s see if we’re not missing a point here. Under whose rule is government? No, uh-uh. No. Lucifer said to the Lord Jesus, and he showed him the governments and the principalities and the powers of this world, and said, “All these are mine, and I will give them to you, if you will but bow down and worship me.” And the Lord Jesus didn’t say, “Those are mine, not yours.” He didn’t question that at all. He just said, “Don’t tempt me. You shouldn’t tempt me. You should worship only God.” Okay. Then is scripture in error here because it says these people have all been given authority by who? Established by who? And have been given authority by who? Verse 1. By God. All authority is from God, and all of these governments and governmental officials are established by God. Now, that’s revolutionary. Look, in the day we live in right now, we are living in the day of the Pentecostals. Oh, a hundred years ago, on the frontiers, we lived in the days of the Baptists. The Baptists and Methodists had this nation sewn up. Anything that was going on, the Baptists or the Methodists were doing it. Then the Methodists quit doing it. The Baptists were doing it all. You would live in the Pentecostal age. Charismatic. Pentecostal. They got the front row. They got the attention. They got the television. They got the numbers. They got the ear of the world, of the Christian world. They also have a very deep, embedded weakness that comes very close to being Manichean.

Now, you don’t know what Manichean is. Why don’t you ask me what Manichean is? What is Manichean? Well, during the era of the early church, there was a guy named Mani, somebody; I forgot what his name was. He was teaching a kind of Zoroastrianism that held that there are two equal forces in the world—good and evil, darkness and light—and they’re constantly at war. And when I hear Pentecostals talk, I have the feeling that they’re Manicheans. “Oh, the devil’s just getting in and everything’s terrible. The devil’s getting his way, and it’s just terrible.” You hear a Pentecostal preacher preaching, “Somebody in the church didn’t do something he wanted, and the devil has got into some of the people here.” And I’ll tell you, and the devil…you’ve got to be careful about the devil. All he is just trying to get his way and blaming it on the devil. That’s right, and it boils down to, if it’s good, it’s God, and if it’s uncomfortable, the devil did it. Are you following me? Well, I want you to know, a cross is terribly uncomfortable. And 39 lashes on the back are terribly uncomfortable. “Well, the devil did it.” I think if Paul had the attitude that everything bad that happened to him was the devil, he would have been so bitter that he wouldn’t have lasted three years in the work of God. Brothers and sisters, all governments are in the hands of the enemy, but all governments are in the hands of God.

Now, where does that put the devil? In the hand of God. That’s so hard to take. We just want to blame some things on the devil. You’d better take everything, bypass the devil, and get straight to your Lord, because everything is ultimately sovereignly in His hand—including your roommate, including the leaders, and for the leaders, the peasants are in His hand, and the dinkies are in His hand, and a lackey—you know what a lackey is? He’s someone who lacks everything. There’s an old joke here. This has got family humor going here. I do, okay.

All things that come into my life are from the hand of God, and if I don’t hold on to that, I will be destroyed. If I had ever, in one moment in my life, shifted from that, I was very close to being destroyed. I have had too many things happen to me in my life that are very, very difficult to handle. If I do not fall down before the Lord and say, “Lord, somewhere in this was your purpose in my life,” if I don’t do that, I’m in big trouble. So, this passage has something else in it besides talking about speeding tickets, taxes, tolls, and customs—that everything is in the hands of God ultimately. Well, sometimes, to distinguish what we should and should not do, we can’t do it by the rules; we have to follow our spirits, because if all things are in the hands of God, sometimes we have to know that there’s a time to move on and a time to stay and suffer. But there is never a time to get bitter and to cast blame.

Now, say amen. Verses 8, 9, and 10 of chapter 13: “Owe nothing to anyone except love.” Now, I think, saints, that a Christian should never go in debt—that’s my personal judgment. I think that was taught right here. I really do. My wife’s going to love this: I owe for a house. I owe more money on that house than you could ever dream a human could owe. I have to live to be 86 in order to pay that house off. That’s right—86 years. 85? No, I’ve already been living into the year. I’ve got to live to be 85. Do you think I’m going to pay that thing off? I’m going to leave it to my two girls to pay off. Hi, kids. I don’t know what to do about that, but I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to tell you something else that was put there for some reason, and it should be paid attention to. You should either do it totally, or you at least need to understand that there’s a limit to your indebtedness, and what you can do in your way of indebtedness.

Alright, I’m going to end tonight with verses 8 through 10. Verses 8, 9, and 10 say, “Love one another.” You fulfill all the law when you love one another. You’ll not commit adultery if you love, because otherwise, you know somebody’s going to get really hurt badly. You’re not going to steal, you’re not going to murder, you’re not going to covet. It’s all fulfilled in love—love your neighbor as yourself. Love is not going to hurt another person. Therefore, love fulfills all the law.

Now, by the way, 11 through 14 are the things that will get you thrown out of the church because they’re darkness. These others won’t get you thrown out of the church; they just make your life miserable, but you can get thrown out of the church by continuing in those things that are listed, at least in 12 and 13. And 14 is a beautiful exhortation. I may have a chance to talk about it, but I may not. This may be the end of this message. There’s a chapter I left out in Preventing a Church Split. I didn’t know I left it out, but I’ve thought very seriously about putting it in. I don’t want to talk to you now. I don’t want to talk to you now. I want you all to be 10 years older than you are right now and listen to me. Will you? Listen to me. Will you just add 10 years to your age right now? Everybody figure out how old you are 10 years from now. James, how old will you be 10 years from now? Robert, excuse me, Robert. George, Pete. Forty, forty-three. Forty-three, okay. If I can find a young sister in here to ask how she’ll be 10 years from now, I don’t want to see…how old will you be? Twenty-nine.

When I said to you, ‘When we begin moving away from the Lord, when we’re not hot in our spirits for the Lord, we tend to forget things.’ You’re not always going to be young, and maybe someday some of those songs will wear out. Maybe someday you’ll walk into this place and say, “What a dump.” I don’t know what may walk into your mind, but I want to give you a couple of clues as to what to look for in your life. If you start to divide, you may be starting to divide the church. If you’ve read any of my writings, you know I don’t look too kindly on people who bring division to the church. Do you know that? To me, that’s a fall on the bride of Christ. A person cannot do that unless a lot of things are going on inside of him. He’s got to be powerfully motivated. He’s got to be obsessed with the idea that it would be better if that church stopped, or that the people in charge and leadership be stopped. Then they go on. I wrote in the book Preventing the Church Split that there’s one thing that all division has in common, and that is this: the person is not worthy to live. That is common to all of them. Now, in our day and age, it’s not ‘he’s not worthy to live’, but rather ‘he shouldn’t be allowed to carry on’, or ‘they shouldn’t be allowed to carry on’. If you could stop and examine that one thing and never touch that, division would just about end. I am convinced that most brothers and sisters do not ever split a church. It gets split, but they don’t start out to do it. They start out to stop somebody from doing something that they feel shouldn’t be done, and I don’t mean a particular event, but a trend, maybe a lifelong trend.

Two things I would ask you to watch out for in your own life that are outside of love. One of them is when you start—I hope you’ll, I know you’re not going to remember this, but I wish you would—when you start keeping a highly exacting monitoring of someone else’s faults. Now, let me just try to explain. Robert, I’ve picked on you all evening; why quit now? I don’t really know much about any of you, but I know that Robert and I have eccentricities. That means we’re a little off-center. And you put up with this in Robert. There are things he just does funny and strange, and there are patterns in his life. Yeah, really. Okay, and somewhere right now, that’s fine. You tolerate that. You accept it as Robert, but the day comes when you start being able to categorize the things in Robert’s life, and every day or every week, you are finding another fault. The truth of the matter is, you’re not finding them; they’ve been there all the time. What you are doing, and probably doing in the ears of someone else, is helping people open their eyes and see Robert for what he really is, and when others are in agreement with you, “Yeah, that’s right, Robert said such and such last week, and he didn’t do it. What was Robert so-and-so? Why didn’t Robert do such and such? Robert so-and-so and so-and-so didn’t such and such and such and such.” Do you understand what I’m saying? Suddenly, that which has been tolerated in Robert all along is now no longer acceptable. Friend, you’re in the flesh. Robert is just Robert, Stan is just Stan, Linda’s just Linda, Alex is just Alex, and you’ve gotten bitter with whoever else in this place may or may not be in leadership.

Now, that’s one I would like for you to know, and I say this cuttingly. I would like to have the privilege, if you’re going to do that to Robert, I’d like to have the privilege of doing that to you. I’d like to watch you for the next two months, and I’ll bet you I can find paradoxes, inconsistencies, and patterns that make Robert look like an angel. My point is, when you start examining someone’s life and bitterly begin to record all the errors and things that he made, there is nobody who can stand—nobody, including you. Nobody.