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

Let’s go to chapter 15. Paul ends this whole section with chapter 15, verse 3: Christ did not choose His own pleasure, but he let reproach that was not his fall on Him. He let responsibility for which He was not responsible fall upon Him, and that’s what Paul is exhorting you and me to do. Now, all the rest of this chapter, from verse 17-21, has to do with the Jews and the Gentiles, and I have actually already spoken to you about this section. If you’ll remember, the first night I went through all your problems, I talked to you about what a Jew and a Gentile were. If you don’t remember, then I said to you in this room, there are Jews and Gentiles. A Gentile is someone who seeks after knowledge, who is not strict and very simple, very heady in their knowledge, and very loose in their morals. A Jew is someone who is very strong in morals and given to signs and wonders, even to the point of saying, “If you really are a man of God, show us a sign.” This will prove that you are a man of God. If you are who you say you are, show us a sign. They are inclined toward the miraculous, they are inclined toward the religious and the moral, and the Gentile is inclined toward freedom and looseness. He doesn’t have the depth of character that the Jew does.

I guess it boils down to a matter of character. The Gentile doesn’t have as much character as the Jew does. Watchman Nee said, It is easier for a strict moralist to become a Christian and stay that way than for a very loose person. I’m sure you have noticed this. If you bring in a dope addict or someone who is in some sort of perverted sin, he’s going to have a much harder time than somebody who’s never drunk, never smoked, never cursed, never run around, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t chew, and I don’t run around with those who do. He has developed a stronger will, and his chances are better. This is the conflict that’s going to go on from now to the day the Lord Jesus comes, and it is here in the church in Rome, and all I can tell you is, brothers and sisters, that Christ died for both of you. The Lord Jesus Christ died for both of you. Now, I would think that he would have been more pleased to die for the less sinful, wouldn’t you?  But he even died for the homosexual, for the pervert, for those who have gone into witchcraft, those who are weak-willed, and those who have very little strength. The psychotics among us; Christ died for them, too.

Now then, this is where I would sum everything up in this section: just one simple statement will cover most of chapters 12, 13, 14, and 15. It comes in the form of a question: Did Jesus Christ accept you? This is Romans 15:7: Wherefore accept one another just as Jesus Christ accepted you. Did Christ Jesus accept you?  Then, if you refuse to accept another brother because of your standards, you have stepped outside of the Lord’s boundaries. Has Jesus Christ accepted this sister? This brother, this sister, this sister, this sister, this brother, and you would not, because of your puny, funny, little, strange cultural standards. Your peripheral ideas? I don’t know what to say to you about whether this brother starts staggering into the building drunk. I don’t know what to say to you if this sister starts screaming and yelling at people. I don’t know what to say to you if that sister starts causing strife and division in the body and cultivates jealousy and faction. Those are really difficult things to handle. I don’t know how to address them. You take them one at a time, you don’t draw up any standards, you take them one at a time, but you do try. If this sister starts screaming and yelling at everybody, whatever you finally decide to do with her, when she starts two years later, screaming and hollering at everybody, you just have to like her better; you don’t come up with a new standard for her. When the church acts, it has to establish a standard and stay with it; otherwise, you’re playing politics, and that’s not acceptable. Otherwise, brothers, we accept one another with our eccentricities, our differences, our dispositions, and our different standards of what it means to be a stumbling block to a weaker person. We accept one another.

Are you clear? I’m going to address this question. I’m finished. That finishes it. I’m not through, but I’m finished. I’m not through, but I’m finished with Romans. Okay, we finished on moral issues. Now, are you going to get along with one another forever? It’s a cakewalk now, huh? I hope you will forever remember what I talked about last night when I said that you will begin to constantly find fault with another Christian, and when you get in a room with three or four other people, and you sit there and belabor all of his weaknesses, you just start the division in the three. You ought never to do that, my brother, my sister, you ought never to do that, never, never be part of that. It is better that you leave, even if you were the one who started the thing and all your life is in it. There are some things we don’t stoop to; we don’t stoop to divisiveness, contention, or fighting with one another. We just don’t do that.

Now, a lot of the things that I went over with you the first night, when I talked to you about problems in the church of Jesus Christ, you recognized, and so did I, as being here within the church. I have no particular scriptural grounds, scriptural reason in these passages to talk about what I’m going to talk about, but I’m going to say it because it has to do with our eccentricities and our pain, our eccentricities and our pain.

Then there’s a third thing, and it is stuff so off the wall and so far out that I have never known what to do with it, stuff that’s just outside the believable. I’ll give you an illustration of a brother who lived among us. Now this is a true story, and I’m not happy telling it to you, but it’s going to help you understand the rest. This brother, a young single brother, a little stupid single brother, probably psychotic, probably genuinely certifiably nuts, but it didn’t show. He would walk up to a sister and say, ” Sister, I thought about killing you with a butcher knife, and I want you to forgive me.” Fifteen minutes later, he’d walk up to another sister and say to her, “Sister, I have this…and say something very horrible, and he defended that as saying he was keeping his life clear of all sin and confessing and putting things behind him. I don’t know how…I’ve been angry a few times in my life, but I don’t know if I’ve ever been angrier with anybody in my life than I was with him. Several brothers tried to talk to him, but he was unapproachable. He felt he was the godliest human walking, and I sat down to talk with him, and he was treating me as though I was his peer. “Gene, you would be the one person who would understand because…”  and he quotes scripture and so on and so forth, but he had half the people in church terrorized. What do you do with him? You tell me what you do with that person. What do you do with this guy?

What do you do with a brother who’s on heroin? And he breaks into the church, a place where the church keeps the money every night, night after night, after every meeting, he breaks in and steals the money. What do you do? Of course, that was a little easier, wasn’t it? What do you do with a sister who begins to dominate the lives of all the other sisters in her church, and those who will not be dominated, she takes those who do, and she takes upon herself a male role. There’s no lesbianism there; it’s just a male role she’s playing. Playing the part of the husband, and these others are responding to her as her children or wife. What do you do? Now, multiply that by 100 or 150 examples, and you will know one of the reasons I am gray-headed.

Now again, I’m not in a Baptist church; I’m in a community of believers, and these are things that suddenly affect all of us. As it says here, I do not live to myself, and I do not die to myself. Every one of us, in the way we relate to others, eventually affects the entire body of Christ. None of the problems in this book are relevant to anyone except those who meet at the home of Priscilla and Aquilla.

What do you do with a brother and sister who are married but have never consummated the marriage? What do you do? Profound deep problems. What do you do with a girl who loves the Lord very, very much, but she is a nymphomaniac? I hope you all know what that is. I don’t want to tell you what that is. She cannot help but have relationships with men; she just does. It’s compulsive, and she cannot stop. What do you do with people who are so messed up because they were beaten when they were a child or raped when they were a child? What do you do for a brother who is a peeping Tom? Compulsive? What do you do with a Kleptomaniac? You know what a Kleptomaniac is, I hope. Good, you’re not totally without sophistication, I mean, even just going back over the pain of these memories is just devastating to me. These are brothers and sisters for whom Jesus Christ died.

And then I think of all the family problems, the marriage problems between brothers and sisters. Now, I’ll tell you what I did. Tell you exactly what I did, and y’all listen out there because I want to tell you what I did. Almost from the beginning of my ministry, I have turned to Christian counselors to help, and that has been true up until this year. Now that spans at least 35 years. I didn’t turn to them because I believed in them; I know they’re not in the New Testament.  I read the New Testament one time. I know they’re not in there. I turned to them out of compassion for my brothers and sisters who were bleeding and hurting and suffering. I think you all know that Christian counselors, in general, work for many suppositions, but one or two of them are your worth and your worth in Christ. Another one is that a lot of your problems stem from your childhood, which seems to be a genuine situation. And getting a hold of inner motivators, things that really motivate you, things you’re not in touch with. Well, I continued this after I left the religious system and got out into this world. In fact, I’m sure that I am the only brother out here, outside the organized church; everybody is so narrow-minded that their ears touch. All psychology and all Christian counseling are of the devil, and the fundamentalists say, just preach the bible, preach the bible.  That’s all people need. Go pray and read your Bible, and you will be alright. You know, flip, flip, flippant on things. I care more than that for my people and God’s people.

I’m going to tell all of you what my experience has been. I want you to know what it’s been, and it’s unique. I don’t know if anybody else has ever charged Christian counseling with what I’m about to charge it with, and I’m definitely about to lay a charge against it. Something is wrong with Christian counseling, but not the things that I have always heard lodged against it. I’m a little slow on the uptake sometimes. It takes me a while to get clear on things. In this case, 38 years. Let me explain to you why. Let’s take a secular organization with a man who plays golf, is the company’s vice president, and does little else. They finally have to fire him because he is obsessed with golf. Now, when they go to look for someone else, what’s the one thing they want to make sure the next replacement does not do? They shouldn’t play golf, and yet, they may very well turn down the very best possible person just because you played golf and got some guy who’s drunk. Then there are two things: no golf, but drunk, and on it goes. Well, I had a bad situation with Christian counselors, and I wasn’t about to say that damns all of them. So, I tried again. That was two times, and the same thing happened again. I thought, It’s a coincidence, so I tried the third time, and it happened again, and then I tried the fourth time, and it happened again. And then I said, I’m going to quit this. We’re going to go get our own Christian counselor.  So, we had a lot of people trained in Christian counseling, several of them with one- or two-years’ experience and who had gotten a master’s degree, and it ended the fellowship. These were people who grew up in the church. And then it happened the fifth and sixth times with our own homegrown people who knew church life, and now I’m standing up here on my hind legs and saying, after 38 years, or about 25 of this, I’m not going to do that anymore.