Prayer of Consecration

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.

Jesus, We belong to you.

Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Scripture

All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.

Romans 2:12–16 (NIV) 

Consider This

Welcome back to Sin Swamp where today we will be talking about the Law.

A text like today’s seems irrelevant and even obtuse to the average twenty-first-century bible reader. It feels like Paul is dealing with a first-century issue we no longer deal with. Truth is, we don’t—and yet we do. I’ll say a word in the notes about the historical piece so we can get on to the present-day matters.1

Just as there is capital S Sin and little s sins so there is the capital “L” Law and all the little “l” laws.

The capital L law, according to Jesus, is, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ and to ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’’’ (see Mark 12:30–31)

All the little “l” laws show us examples of what it looks like to break the capital L law.

Capital S Sin simply means the failure of love. Little “s” sins are all the ways we do so. The problem is we put all the focus on the little “l” laws and consequently the little “s” sins. We must get our focus back onto the capital L Law of Love. Only this will shift us out of sin management mode with its endless behavior modification strategies which is another name for religious legalism.

Let’s bring it all together with a practical example.

It might surprise you to know that I am obese. I’m not super fat, but according to the charts, I qualify. I am five foot eleven inches and I weigh (can’t believe I’m telling you this) 221 pounds as of yesterday. I have been stuck in a plus or minus range of 220 for the past four years. I’m actually down from 236 pounds at my high. The charts say I should weigh around 180.

I’ve done calorie counting, WeightWatchers, Atkins diet, Whole30, keto, Mediterranean diet, intermittent fasting, macro management, diet pills, the Noom app, weight training, 10,000 steps a day, and whatever is next. Still, I remain obese—stuck at 220 pounds.

I find all of these programs and approaches have in common a focus on little “l” laws and little “s” sins. Don’t do this, reduce that, measure this, count that, calories in, calories out, weigh every day, weigh every week, weight is just a number, don’t weigh at all, throw the scale away, analyze, monitor, track, record, and repeat. And rest too, yes, rest. Oh yeah, and I forgot, drink a ton of water. And the insane thing is all of it kind of works and yet none of it really works at all. It is a kind of religion in and of itself.

They are all just so many little “l” laws, aren’t they? And they are all addressing so many little “s” sins, aren’t they?2 More little laws will never get it done. And it’s amazing how in focusing on so many things we miss the one thing. The whole point Paul will make about the Law and legalistic religion in Romans (and the rest of his letters) is law is powerless to change people. Sneak Preview:

For what the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Rom. 8:3–4)

So how am I going to lose thirty to forty more pounds?

It’s the wrong question, isn’t it? That is the question of little laws and little sins. It is the wrong focus.

So what is the right question?

Some of you are undoubtedly asking, what does any of this have to do with Jesus and Romans and being a Christian? What does my physical body have to do with being more spiritually alive and mature? What if the answer is—everything? Here’s another sneak peek:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. (Rom. 12:1)

What if the question is, “How might I offer my body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God?” Every. Single. Day. This would mean asking this kind of question:

How might I love God with my body? And truth be told, what do we actually have outside of our own physical body?

From here, we might ask this question, “How might I live according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh?”

Now we are getting somewhere.  

Prayer

Prayer of Consecration

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.

Jesus, We belong to you.

Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

Scripture

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, forbearance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?

Romans 2:1–4 (NIV) 

Consider This

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was way back in the late 1900s, near the turn of the century. I was a local church pastor in Texas. One day our worship leader invited me to listen to a new song he was writing and give him my thoughts. The song gripped me and to remember it takes me there. Here are some of the words:

Open up the skies of mercy.

Rain down the cleansing flood

Healing waters rise around us

Hear our cries, Lord

Let them rise

And then the chorus:

It’s your kindness, Lord

That leads us to repentance.

Your favor Lord is our desire.

It’s your beauty, Lord

That makes us stand in silence.

And your love is better than life.

My thoughts? Wow! Amazing! Perfect.

Though I had contributed thoughts and ideas to some of his other songs, I was speechless before this one.

The song revealed something about repentance I had never grasped. In those days repentance felt to me like behavior management. You know—stop sinning.

If there were two words I would not have connected it would have been kindness and repentance. And there they are plain as day in today’s text:

God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance?

The Greek word behind repentance is metanoia. It means to have a change of mindset. A related meaning for repentance is to make a 180-degree turnaround.

It brings us back around to our conversation about focus. Will we focus on the problem of Sin or on the person of Jesus? We can’t simultaneously focus on that which we are turning away from and that which we are turning to. We must choose. The focus of repentance is not on turning away from sin but on turning to Jesus.

The person of Jesus is the riches of the kindness of God. As we turn to him we begin to turn our lives over to him and sin loses not only its luster but its power. It’s why the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of all who will believe. It’s why the gospel is Jesus.  

Prayer

Jesus, we belong to you. Yes, Jesus, I belong to you. Jesus, you are the gospel. You are the kindness of God. You are the power of God. It’s why I love to repent because it means turning to you. As I am turned to you I cannot at the same time be turned to sin. Come Holy Spirit and train me in this turning to Jesus and turning my life over to him. It is an awe-filled thought to fathom how he has turned his life toward me. What a kindness. Praying in Jesus’s name, amen.

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.

Jesus, We belong to you.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.

Romans 1:24–32 (NIV)

Let me say at the outset today that I believe every single word of today’s text without exception (and every other day for that matter). It is a clear, unambiguous, strafing of both capital S Sin and lowercase s sins and the people who commit them. And to be clear—that would be all of us—every single one.

That said, in the spirit of what I said yesterday, I will wait to deal with yesterday’s and today’s texts until next week and the week following. See the note below for a bit more on my approach.1 Suffice it to say, today I want to practice what I preach and give prior focus to the gospel about which this entire book (if not the entire Bible) is devoted.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith” (Rom. 1:16–17).

In today’s text, Paul captures for us the very essence (if not the definition) of Sin in one sentence. Notice I capitalized the word sin as Sin. We will say much more about this in the coming few weeks, but we must begin to grasp the relationship between our Sin and our sins. Paul begins by giving us one of the clearest definitions of capital S Sin in the whole Bible:

They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Paul then gives us a representative but not an exhaustive list of the little s sins by detailing for us the scene of an average day in first-century Rome (and any other society suffering in the advanced stages of the metastatic cancer of Sin.) Our sins are the symptoms, but the sickness is Sin. The rest of the letter and every other letter in the New Testament is all about the cure. It comes down to one Word: Jesus.

We must make a critical shift in our understanding and orientation before launching into the deeps of this letter to the Romans and to us. We must shift from the notion of the little phrase, “The gospel of Jesus,” to the equally little but infinitely larger phrase: The gospel is Jesus.

I want you to reflect deeply on this today. The gospel is Jesus.

As Martin Luther famously sang, “He must win the battle.” In fact, he already has.  

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.

Jesus, We belong to you.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

Romans 1:18–23 (NIV)

Chapter 1 of Romans takes us on quite a journey.

Yesterday we stood together in awe of the burning bush of the New Testament. Today and tomorrow we will stand in shock before a burning house.

The burning bush:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

The burning house:

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness,

The real dilemma we must solve here at the outset—as it relates not only to the letter to the Romans but to our very hearts, homes, churches, and cities—is this one: Where will we focus? Will we focus on the burning bush or the burning house? Will we focus on the problem of sin or the power of the gospel? Will we focus on the crucified-risen Messiah or the chaotic mess in the world and our lives? Will we focus on the diabolical problem of sin and its myriad manifestations or the singular solution of salvation in Jesus Christ?

The seduction is to think you can choose both. To try and choose both is to choose neither. It is to wind up stuck in the eddies instead of the river (i.e., Romans 7 vs. Romans 8). We will not deny sin here. We must not. Sin is undeniably real. It is diabolical and devastating and yet it is a distraction. Sin’s most deceptive and successful strategy is to consume the conversation and crowd Jesus out. We cannot deny sin’s reality. But we must deny sin our focus. We must reserve our unfettered and undeniable focus for Jesus himself, only, ever, and always.

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.

Jesus, We belong to you.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

Romans 1:16–17 (NIV)

Today’s text is nothing short of a burning bush—on fire and consuming but not consumed. It has burned with brilliance from the day it was inspired by the Holy Spirit and written on parchment.

Billions have warmed to its fire and been found in its light. If Romans can be summarized (which it can’t) this is it.

I don’t know if you know this about me, but I am a poet. I just decided one day many years hence.1 I wrote the poem below back around Easter after meeting up with an old friend. While I know my verse will not do the text justice, I am certain my normal commentary is wholly inadequate. I call it . . .

The Hard and Beautiful Truth

“I don’t want you to think I’m not a good person.”
That’s what my old friend said to me
upon meeting again after decades apart
and a long confession of her broken story.

I assured her with The Hard and Beautiful Truth:

“You are not a good person.
I’m not either.
We are broken sinners.”

Something deep in me (and maybe you too)
wants to believe we are good (or worse that we are bad)—
that we just need to lose twenty pounds,
drop a few bad habits, and try harder to be better.

Then I assure myself with The Hard and Beautiful Truth:

Good people and bad people is a lie
from the pit of hell,
and the way from good to great (or bad to worse)
paves the way there.

Jesus only goes from
Death to Life
Lost to Found
Slave to Free
Broken to Beautiful

Then she asked me, “If you are not good, what are you?”

“LOVED,” I said.
“I am loved,
and you are too.”

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.

Jesus, I belong to you.

I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.

Jesus, We belong to you.

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world. God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.

I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong—that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles.

I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome.

Romans 1:8–15

Can we get our bearings a bit on what is going on here?

Rome, in the first century, was the capital of the world. It was a city of around a million people. The early church in Rome, not to be confused with the modern day Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican, was a series of house churches likely comprising a total of about one hundred people.

Get this fixed in your mind. We are in the most powerful city in the first century world ruled over by the most powerful (and cruel) man in the world, Lord Caesar (Nero). The threat is a hundred lower-class people scattered across the city (meeting in homes) who are ostensibly being led by a dead man who was reportedly resurrected from the grave and ascended to Heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, Lord Messiah (Jesus).

It gets better. We are reading a letter written by the apostle Paul around the year 50ish to a tiny church planted by the apostle Peter several years earlier and behold what is unfolding . . .

First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world.

The faith of a hundred people is being reported all over the world, and they didn’t even have the internet. By the power of the gospel of Jesus, through the obedience of their faith, one hundred people—bound by love and federated by freedom, would plant the flag of the kingdom of God in such a way that the Roman Empire would ultimately come undone at the seams.

Maybe that’s why John Wesley would write centuries later in the midst of the great British Awakening, “Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of Hell and set up the kingdom of Heaven upon Earth.”

This letter to the hundred Christians in the several little Roman house churches is easily the most important letter ever written in the history of the world—not because of what it says to us but what it said to them. For today, my friends, we are them. And Rome is now another name for home. Our ten-year-olds are killing themselves at epidemic rates. Our schools have become slaughter houses. The Democrats and the Republicans and the seductive, toxic politics of outrage will not save the day. Only Jesus can.

That is the message of the letter to the Romans and to us. The gospel of the kingdom of Jesus is the simple yet comprehensive solution for all that is broken in our lives and in the world.

In the first century in a city of a million the faith of a hundred was being reported all over the world. Two months ago, in this the twenty-first century, we witnessed the faith of nineteen college students light the first fires of great awakening in this century so far. And I do not exaggerate when I say their faith is being reported all over the world.

What could happen if we woke up and began to move in the obedience of faith in our time?

One of the most noteworthy things about Jesus’ life and ministry is to note that the people who were the least like Jesus were the same people who the most attracted to him. Jesus was the perfect image of a holy and righteous God, a man who went his whole life experiencing the same temptations that we all experience, and yet he resisted every one and never sinned. You might expect people who were great sinners to be uncomfortable around Jesus, and maybe even be repelled by him. But the opposite was the case. People who were under the power of shameful sin loved to spend time with Jesus. Why?

The answer certainly isn’t because Jesus downplayed or neglected talking about the moral commands of God. When Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), not only did he teach about God’s moral commands, Jesus intensified them. He would say things like, “In the Mosaic law, you are told not to murder. But I say that if you harbor resentment and anger toward another, you’ve already committed murder in your heart.” Yet, that high moral and spiritual calling that Jesus gave continually didn’t seem to prevent people from flocking to him.

The reason is because Jesus also reached out passionately to those who fell the most short of that high moral and spiritual calling. Jesus communicated over and over again that he loved and accepted the worst of sinners. And as those sinners followed Jesus and spent time with Jesus, they were transformed from sinners into saints.

What does this tell us as the church? It tells us that our calling is to follow the same pattern. On one hand, we proclaim the high call of holiness to our community and our world. And on the other hand, we offer never-ending grace and acceptance and welcome to each and every person we encounter. Doing both faithfully can often times be messy, but it is worth it, because that balance of grace and truth will transform the world.

In Christ,

Clint