If you've got your Bibles, you can turn to Romans chapter 9. Tonight we're going to look at what I'm calling the characteristics of a genuine burden. We did a study similar to this, very similar to this, in the men's prayer meeting about a year and a half ago. So a couple of you have heard something along these lines already, three of you probably. But I think it's good for us to review these kinds of things from time to time. Because oftentimes we, as Christians, we refer to having burdens over something, don't we? A prayer burden, or we're burdened for somebody. And that sort of thing. And when it comes time to prayer, we bring what we call our burdens to the Lord. And that's kind of a churchy term, isn't it? It's a term that we bandy about. But people who aren't as familiar with church things, people who didn't grow up in church, they might not know exactly what that means. And so, and a bigger problem, I guess, is because it's possible that sometimes Christians might not know exactly what that means either, especially young believers. What does it mean to have a burden for someone? So we're gonna be looking at that. In the life of Paul, He demonstrated in this passage we're going to be looking at what I think are five characteristics of a genuine prayer burden. And he was sharing this in his epistle to the Romans. So he's writing to Roman Christians, he's writing to other believers. And so while we don't see this actual term burden in the verses we're gonna be looking at tonight, it's certainly what he's talking about. That he's got a burden, a heavy heart, so to speak, What we're going to be looking at is a very specific example of a burden that Paul had, but it carries forth to us with very general applications to other burdens that we can have among ourselves. So we'll be looking at these characteristics in Romans chapter nine. Let's go to the Lord in prayer first. Father, again, we thank you for allowing us to make our way back to your house this evening. We pray that as we study your word together that you would teach us from it. Father, we're in need of you people. We recognize that. We need your presence to us, among us. We need your guidance as we look into your word to understand it. We need you to open our hearts and our minds to receive you, the truth of scripture. We need you, Father, to give us that impulse to obey your word, to put it into practice. And we pray that you might do that for each one of us. If there's anyone here this evening who is suffering with an illness, pain, discomfort, problems that maybe they're not sure what to do with. We pray that this evening, Father, you might come alongside them and grant comfort and encouragement and help them to see if there are those here who may be able to help them with the need. But certainly there is one above who is able to help, and that is our Father. And so, Lord, we just commit them to you and ask you to meet needs as only you can. Guide us now as we look into the epistle of Romans. Teach us the things that we need to see in these words from the apostle Paul as the Holy Spirit inspired him. Please guide us now. We commit the time to you in Jesus name. Amen. So I'm going to start reading in Romans chapter nine, verse one. Paul writing again, as I said, he says, I say the truth in Christ. I lie not. My conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ from my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises, whose are the fathers, and of whom is concerning the flesh Christ came, whose over all God blessed forever, amen. He's talking about his kinsmen, his fellow Jews. And look at all the blessings that he talks about there. with them. He says in verse four, they're Israelites, they're God's chosen nation. He says to them pertain the adoption and the glory and the covenants, all of the things that God had worked among them, all these blessings. He says they should be coming to the Lord Jesus Christ, but they're not. And he says the law was given to them. They were given the opportunity to serve God and share the word of God with the other nations around them. The promises were made to them. All of those things, Paul says, and I've got a burden for them because they're not coming to Christ. They're not, as we talked about this morning, how the law of God was supposed to be the schoolmaster to lead these people to the Lord Jesus. It wasn't happening in large numbers, as Paul would like to see. Many, many of the Jews were, they were just simply rejecting Christ. In verse, or in chapter 10, rather, of verse one says this, Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved. That's what it came down to. Paul wanted to see these people saved. And so these verses, I think, provide us a glimpse into Paul's burden for these lost Jews. But at the same time, it provides guidelines for us to have burdens for other people, lost people among us, certainly, but other people as well, people with other needs besides their salvation. We can have a burden for those. So as I said, there's five things that I see here that are Characteristics of a genuine burden. The first one is that a genuine burden involves discomfort. If you truly are burdened for someone, as we see here with Paul, he was discomforted over that. Verse two, he said, I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. This burden brought him what he referred to as great heaviness. That term great, it comes from the Greek word megas, which means something that's exceedingly large. something that is very strong, perhaps. And that word has been transliterated into English. We hear that term all the time. Don't we? Mega this and mega that. I think it came about, one of the earliest places that you saw it was in the engineering world, the computer programming, the data analysis world, when you started thinking of the number of bytes of of storage that a computer might have. First, it was kilobytes, thousands of bytes of data. And everybody thought, wow, that is just swell. That's a huge amount of data. The computers that NASA had in the Apollo program that sent men to the moon and brought them back safely were measured in thousands of bytes of data. And then the technology increased, and you started hearing about megabytes, which were millions of bytes of data. And then you go to gigabytes, which I think are billions or trillions. I can't remember exactly which. And now there are terabytes, which I think is 10 to the 12th number of them. But mega stuck. You don't hear too many people going around talking about a gigahero. You don't hear anybody talking about a kilohero, because that's not that big, but a mega. hero, a mega whatever, a mega celebrity. And so we hear that term, don't we? And so we know what that means, but he says, I've got a megas, megas heaviness. That heavy, the term heaviness, it means anxiety. He had an anxiety for these Jewish brethren of his. He had a fear for them because of their condition. He had, it means to have a care. It can't even mean sorrow. But it means certainly that he's got this incredible fear for the Jewish people who keep rejecting Christ because he knows exactly what awaits them when this life is over. And then he says he also has a sorrow in his heart. And that Greek term that's translated sorrow there, it means a consuming grief. It's not just that he feels bad about them. This is a consuming grief that he's got, this incredible heaviness, his burden for his fellow Jews. then it resulted in them having an exceeding fear and grief over their own belief. I mean, after all, they had rejected their Messiah. We talked about that some this morning. We've talked about it many times before. These are people who had been looking for the Messiah all their lives, and when he came, some of them believed and some of them accepted, and some of them allowed their religious leaders to turn them away from Jesus because they rejected him. They said, oh, he casts out demons by, Power of Satan, you can't trust this man. Why would you not trust this man who could give sight to the blind? This man who spoke as no man ever spake before. This man who was kind and gentle and comforting and came about as a shepherd, and yet they were turning away from him in droves. And that really bothered Paul. It gave him a level of discomfort. So that's one thing that a burden, a genuine burden will do. It'll give us discomfort. The second thing that it will give us, a genuine burden, that we notice about it, it's unceasing. It doesn't go away. Look at verse two again. The same words, just a little different emphasis. He said, I have a great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. It doesn't go away. That term continual, it literally means this. This is not a word that we use very often, but it is unintermitted. It's what it literally means. And we know what an intermission is, don't we? You ever watch any, I guess, any of the massive Cecil B. DeMille movies, the Ten Commandments, or any of those other epic pictures? Gone with the Wind is another example. You get about halfway through it, and then they, boom, the screen stops, the motion stops, there's a pretty scene, and they play this soft music, and there's, that's intermission time, isn't it? It's time you can get up, you can stretch your legs, you can go get a new Coke, get some more Fritos, all of that sort of thing, then you can come back and watch the rest of the movie, right? That's what an intermission is. Now, in the world that I came from, in my career, we had other things called intermittent. Intermittent failures, if you were trying to troubleshoot something. It could be, in my world, it was electronics equipment. In the world of an auto mechanic, ask any of them, they will tell you an intermittent failure is tough to find because sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not. You'll be driving along fine, everything's going well, and then suddenly it fails. And you get everything together, okay, I want to troubleshoot this, and suddenly the problem's not there anymore. It's working fine again. And it's off and on like that. That's what an intermittent problem is. Paul says, I have a continual sorrow. There is no intermittentness about it. There's no intermission. It is continual. His exceeding fear and grief over this lost condition, it was relentless. There was no escape from it. There was no Paul saying one day, you know, I've had a real burden from my brethren, the Jews. And then the next day, no mention of it. And if someone mentioned it to him, what about those lost Jews? That's OK, they'll be all right. There's nothing like that in Paul's mind. This was relentless. He had this discomfort. And it was relentless, it was unceasing for him. He worried about these people, he was concerned with them. So that's two things that a genuine burden brings about. A third one is that a genuine burden is sacrificial. Look at verse three, he says, I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh. I could wish this. And this is more, this term wish is stronger than On an afternoon like this one, well, I sure wish I had a cool glass of lemonade while I was sitting on the back porch in the porch swing. It's more than that. It's not just a wish. Well, I would like to have that. The idea is of a prayer. I could pray, Paul says, that my salvation could be given up for them, that I would be willing to be accursed if possible so that my brethren could come to Christ and have eternal life. That's a burden, isn't it? That's a sacrificial burden. And when he says, I wish I could be accursed, that Greek word that's translated accursed, we've heard this word before, it's anathema. It's a word, it has the idea of something that's been banned, something that has been excommunicated, something that has been, in this case, totally, eternally separated from God. That's a, That's a completely different story than what you hear from most people that say, I sure would like to see some people saved. Paul says, I could wish myself was accursed if other people could be saved. Now, we know that couldn't happen. That's not possible, don't we? But his burden was that much. His burden, it brought discomfort, discomfort that didn't cease, and he was willing to sacrifice for it. But we know that that's not possible. If Jesus dying for someone, isn't enough to bring them to Christ. If that knowledge that he was willing to sacrifice himself, then there was nothing that Paul could do. Even if he gave up his salvation, which thankfully we cannot do. We cannot lose it once the Lord has given it to us. Even if he lost his, it wouldn't help those people. They've got to come to Christ too. And Paul knew that, and yet he still had this sacrificial attitude because that was a part of his burden. a part of a genuine burden is that it involves intercessory prayer. Look at chapter 10 in verse 1 again. He said, Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved. That's his desire, my prayer to them. And this word that is translated here as prayer, it means more, it's not just a general prayer. Not like, Lord, I pray you bless. Bless my friends who are lost. That's kind of a general prayer, isn't it? It's much more than that. It's a petition. It's a pleading for a very specific need, and usually it would have the idea of an urgent need. Think of it in terms like this. If your neighbor, if suddenly in the middle of the night, you wake up and your neighbor's house is on fire, and they are in that house, and you can hear them in there shouting for help, and they can't get to an exit, and you can't get in that house, You don't pray for that person. Lord, would you bless them today and help them to have the right amount of food? And would you help their car to work okay and keep their job safe, Lord? And all of this and help them know how to pay their bills. Would that be the kind of prayer you would give for them? That's a general kind of prayer. No, you would be pleading with God. Lord, please let the fire department get here. Let the rescue workers get here. Let me find some way to open that door or bust out a window so we can get them out of there. That's a pleading, isn't it? That's what he's talking about here. Intercessory prayer. His burden led him to plead with God for the salvation of those Jews. And I've got a feeling that when Paul was in prison for those many months, I'm sure that he spent a whole lot of time praying. He couldn't do anything else, could he? He could write, he could try to encourage people, but I'm sure he spent a lot of time praying for the salvation of fellow Jews. but he couldn't save himself. All he could do was share the gospel with them. Only God could save, and that's what led him to that intercessory prayer. And so his burden, a genuine burden, it involves discomfort. It involves, or that it is unceasing. It's sacrificial. It involves intercessory prayer. And the fifth thing that I think we can see that is included in a genuine burden is it's shared with people. Look at chapter nine again, verse one. Paul said, I say the truth in Christ. I lie not. My conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost. He says, I'm telling you the truth. He's sharing his burden with these Christians in Rome as he's writing this letter to them. Chapter 10 in verse 1 again. Brethren, my heart's desire and my prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved. He's sharing this burden with other people. You can help me pray for them. You can almost hear, read between the lines. I've got this continual I've got this continual heartbreak for these people. I would give up my own salvation if I could. Would you help me pray for them?" You can hear that between the lines, I believe. He didn't keep his burden a secret. He shared it. Don't we do the same thing? That's why we have prayer meetings, isn't it? We could stay home and pray on Wednesday nights if that's all that was needed was prayer, but we were given the example. We share our burdens with other people. We come together and we share of what those burdens are. We have a prayer list where we keep track of it, and we pray for other people. We bring our petitions to other people. We intercede on behalf of them with the Lord, and we carry their needs to the throne of mercy, don't we? So he shared his burden with other people, but it's most important we have to consider, and never forget this. He shared that burden with the Lord because he knew the Lord was the one who could save those Jewish people. And he knew that the Lord wasn't one who could, as we looked at this morning, he was the Lord of the harvest. He could send out laborers to the Jewish people. And I believe Paul would have prayed that many, many times as well, wouldn't he? And we do that. We pray that the Lord would send laborers, that he would send other people out, that he would call out people even to the ministry. I'm not sure we hear that as much as we used to, but used to in churches, you would hear people and they would pray Lord, call out people from this congregation, especially a congregation that has more young people. Call them out. We've got young people here who are trying to choose what their career path will be. Lord, touch their hearts and call some of them to be missionaries or pastors or Bible school teachers or whatever it happens to be. And so I think Paul would encourage us to do the same thing, share that burden with other people, but share it with the Lord because he's the one who can bring it to pass. We all have lost loved ones, people that we know in our families or our neighborhoods, people we've worked with, whatever the case might be, who they've heard the gospel. And in our minds, we look at it and we think, how could they not yield to it? It's so simple. When they really look at the gospel, now you and I both, all of us have probably heard some representations of the gospel that were kind of convoluted. Have you heard that? I've sat and listened to some presentations of the gospel, and I've thought, if I were lost, I wouldn't have understood a thing you said. I've been going to church for decades, and I still don't understand some of what you're saying. It's just not clear. But the gospel itself is a very simple message, isn't it? And we wonder to ourselves, as I'm sure Paul did, these Jewish people, they've had the word of God all their lives. And yet they're turning a deaf ear to it. They simply will not trust Jesus Christ. And so he brought this burden to the Lord. And I think what we can say as we come to a close, his burden, it was a lot more than just a passing interest. Paul's burden was very personal to him. We see that here. It brought discomfort. It was unceasing. His burden was sacrificial. He brought that intercessory prayer to the Lord. He shared it because it was very personal to him. It never came, it never left him. There was no intermission, as we talked about. And so we know it was very personal. We might even say it was visceral. He felt that here, deep inside, this yearning that his fellow Jews might be saved. And it didn't give him any rest. That's what a genuine burden does. And you know, I think that Christians we would do well to ask the Lord to give us that kind of burden, wouldn't we? You know, we have to ask ourselves, is there anything, anything in our lives that burden us to that extent? We are that uncomfortable that it's a burden that's unceasing and we never can get away with it or get away from it, rather. And if we don't have a burden like that, maybe we want to ask the Lord for it and hope that he would give us that. So let's pray. Father, again, we thank you for We thank you for the example of the Apostle Paul. We thank you, Father, that he did have a burden. And that burden wasn't just for his fellow Jews. That burden went to Gentiles as well. Paul, he started out his ministry trying to minister to people in synagogues, the Jewish people, trying to get them to turn from their sin to their Savior, the Messiah they'd been looking for all their lives. And so many of them, they opposed him. some violently, some threatening to kill him. He was actually stoned because he tried to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people. There came a time when his ministry largely turned to Gentiles, and so we had a similar burden for them. And so we know that, as we were reading here in Romans chapter nine and Romans chapter 10, this was one very specific example, but it carries over into so many other areas, and it certainly applies to us. I pray, Father, that you might give us a burden for the things that you would have us do. Lord, you might give us a burden for lost souls, that we might be witnesses to them, that you might give us a burden to see our church grow spiritually. We might come closer to you, that we might seek the truth of your word, that it might change our hearts, it might change our lives, so we'd be more effective servants for you. Give us a burden for these things. for the folks who are around us who are lost, for folks around us who are sick and they can't do anything about it, those who are suffering diseases, those who are suffering other problems that we may not understand, those who are facing decisions that we may not have the wisdom to help them with. May we have a burden for those things and bring them to you. Give us those kinds of burdens, Father, and help us to bring those things to you in prayer, to share them with each other. and then to give of ourselves sacrificially to help bring others to you. Thank you again for this time together, for this passage of scripture, for the attention of the folks here. We pray that you would guide us now in the remainder of our time together. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.