Justified to Serve

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. So we are actually in the last of our series today, Justified, How God Mends Broken People in a Broken World. And we're at the beginning of this series, a whole, what, 13 weeks ago, can you imagine? 13 weeks ago, we started off at the end of the letter. And we started off at the end to know where things were going, and we started off at the end and we realized that the whole book of Romans was written to a specific context and a specific time to about, oh, I would say, five to eight house churches in Rome. We discovered that two huge issues were going on in these churches in Rome, and they were power and privilege was being used against each other rather than for each other. And there were divisions between Gentiles and Jews, between slaves and free, between men and women, but that the gospel of justification that Paul proclaimed in this letter, it was the power of God, and it was the power to bring about a whole new status and a whole new way of being and to mend broken people, broken relationships, even a broken world. And today we end where we began with the divisions that Paul lays out here in Romans chapter 14 and 15. He lays out specifically the divisions, as he calls them, between the weak and the strong, and how we now put in practical terms are to live for the sake of others rather than for the sake of ourselves. So we're going to read Romans 15, 1 through 7. We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me. For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may have one voice, with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning, or I think last week, the Roman church in five or eight households, somewhere in that number, small groups, probably about the size of Thrive itself. So there's only in a city of probably a million people, the center of power, the center of privilege. We have five to eight small house churches growing and working together and yet struggling with the same issues their whole society faced and also struggling with issues that their society pinned on them. For instance, in 49 AD, like I mentioned last week, Claudius, the emperor, expelled all the Jews from Rome. I'm not exactly sure why, but he chose to get rid of all of them out of Rome at that point in time and that included those who were Jewish Christians because they didn't distinguish between them at that time. And so we find out in Acts 18 that Priscilla and Aquila actually left Rome at that time and Paul met them. Now, the good news, I guess, is that about 54 AD, Claudius is no more and the Jews started to come back to Rome. And in fact, many of them returned, such a contingent that it could have caused problems itself. Simon Garther Cole, in an article that I read this week, shared what probably this all meant with this influx again of Jewish Christians. He writes, So the Jewish contingent returns to a church which had for some years been almost exclusively Gentile. And it is easy to imagine how such a sudden change in the ethnic makeup of the churches would give rise to, or at least, very least, exacerbate the contentious nature of the issues. You know, churches love new members in the abstract. We love them. We want them. We say we love them. We want them. But in the concrete, it can be kind of difficult sometimes, especially when they come in large numbers and they come all at once. And then all of a sudden it changes everything and upsets the apple cart. When I was a pastor out in Visalia, California, in the Central Valley, I was a pastor of a church that had a few hundred members. And there was one family in our midst from Southeast Asia, Joseph and Maria Keovale. And I wasn't quite sure who, you know, where they came from or what their story was. But when I got to know Joseph and Maria and their children, I found out that Joseph was from the hill tribe in Southeast Asia called Lahu Si. You will probably never meet somebody from Lahu Si tribes, let me tell you, because this was a minority of minorities. Their language had still not been written. OK, it was one of those languages that a Bible translator was trying to write down. But Joseph and Maria, Joseph actually had been a soldier that was recruited by the CIA during the Vietnam War era from Laos, because that's wh...