Please turn now in the Bible to the book of Romans, chapter 15. Romans, chapter 15, towards the end of your Bible. You'll find it on page 949. Romans, chapter 15. I'm going to read from verse 1 to 13, and we're going to consider especially verse 8 to 13. So Romans chapter 15, towards the end of the Apostle Paul's letter to the church in Rome, a church he had not yet visited. So Romans 15, reading from 1 to 13. Just give your attention to the word of God. 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, that 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 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. For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy, as it is written. Therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles and sing to your name. And again it is said, Rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people. And again, praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples extol him. And again, Isaiah says, the root of Jesse will come, even he who arises to rule the Gentiles. In him will the Gentiles hope. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope. We come here to the conclusion of a long section on unity. He's been striving for unity since the beginning of chapter 14. And that should not surprise us. You know how much unity in your family, on your team, on whatever it is, you know how much unity is important for your happiness. If your family is at peace with one another, then you're glad to spend time with your family. And it becomes a source of joy and encouragement. If there's nothing but squabbling and jealousy and division, you see how all the joy is taken out of even the family. This does not surprise us, then, that he wants unity within the church. Because he goes on to say this also is key to God's glory. If there's more arguing in here than there is out in the world, then why was God glorified at all by that? There's no glory going to God from our example if we are broken up with arguing and quarreling. And so he's been saying, we've been going over it now for about a month, we must strive for unity, for the good of our brother and sister, for the glory of God in a healthy church. And he's been analyzing it. the divisions, he's been analyzing those divisions theologically. He's been saying, you know, there is one truth of God, but we're not all in the same place in our consciences. Some people have a strong conscience and they understand how much freedom there is in Christ. Freedom to eat anything. Freedom to set aside the law, the law of Moses about kosher. Some of us understand that. And we can go ahead and we can eat anything. And others are weak in conscience. they haven't quite grasped that Jesus means you don't have to keep kosher anymore. And so he's been saying, don't let that cause division in the church. Don't let that become a reason to have two churches, the kosher one and the non-kosher one. He said you gotta have one church, and the weak are not to condemn the strong, and they're not to violate their own conscience. If you feel in your heart that it's wrong to eat pork, then don't eat pork. You're not correct about that, but don't eat the pork. Because if you feel like you have to withdraw from God to do something, then the withdrawing from God, that's sin, even if the thing is indifferent in itself. Whatever is not from faith is sin, he says. So, the weak should not violate their own conscience, but they shouldn't condemn someone else for his strong conscience. And the strong should not push it on the weak. and should not just withdraw from the weak, no, we should treat one another with love for upbuilding. So he's been giving a theological analysis of the divisions in that church. He's saying it's a matter of conscience, and we're to understand how to live with our own conscience and also with somebody else's conscience in a loving way, remembering that there's one master, Jesus, and it's not for us to judge somebody else's servant. We're all the servants, and there's one master. Now, he's been analyzing the differences in this church theologically. But to a lot of the people there, that would not have been the obvious point of difference. Because theological issues, being spiritual, are invisible. You would not walk into the church and see a theological conscience difference. What do you see as a difference when you come into a church? Well, if there's an ethnic difference, you see that right away. If there's a racial difference, it hits the eye immediately. If there's some socioeconomic difference, you catch that on your second glance. These sociological differences, they instantly impress themselves upon us. And they would have been very obvious in the church in Rome. Who do you think had trouble realizing that they didn't, in God's sight, have to keep kosher. Well, someone who was Jewish, of course. Someone who'd been told to keep kosher every day of his life. That would be the person who'd have trouble getting over it. Now, not in every case. Paul himself, who writes the letter, he's Jewish, and he knows he can eat anything. And when he starts saying hello to people at the end, he says hello to Priscilla and Aquila, his friends from Corinth, where he'd been over the same ground before. So they would have been Jews who knew they could eat anything. So there'd be some exceptions in both directions. But mostly, those who, you would say, were having trouble grasping their freedom with food would have been mostly the Jews in the church. And those who had no trouble with this point, maybe trouble with some sexual points, but not trouble with the food point, would have been mostly the Gentiles. And so he's talking about these theological differences. And some of them are saying, oh, come on, Paul. It's just a Jew and Gentile issue. Because, of course, the theological issue and the sociological issue would have almost matched. They would have been pretty much the same people in the two groups. Now, why does he start with the theology? He starts with a theology to teach us to think about these things theologically, to think about the underlying things. What is right in God's sight? Start with a theology to start with God and ask, what is pleasing to God? We're first to love God. How do I love God in the midst of this? But he can't avoid, nor does he want to avoid, the Jew and Gentile question. He's actually had that as a thread through the whole book. So he turns back now to the Jew and the Gentile difference. And as he does so, of course, he instructs us not only on how to overcome a Jew and Gentile difference in a church, but how to overcome any ethnic difference in a church, or any sociological difference, any of these differences that can make life difficult, and that might tempt us to say, you know what, you go over there, and we'll go over here, and it'll be easier. He gives us instruction here how not to do that. but how to be one body of Christ. He says, Christ served the circumcised. Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness. Now, when he says Christ, he means Jesus, of course. But keep in mind that there's actually an important distinction to be made, you might say, between what you mean when you say Jesus and what you mean when you say Christ. Same person. But Christ is a title, not his last name. Christ means Messiah. And so what he means here is he means that the Messiah, the long-promised Savior, the one who comes from God, the one Isaiah was talking about in chapter 11, he, who is Jesus, became a servant to the circumcised. And by the circumcised, of course, that's simply another way of describing the Jewish people. Jesus served the Jews to show that God is true. Now, how did Jesus serve the Jews? Two ways. He became one, and he ministered among them. Jesus served the Jewish people by coming to earth as a human being. He's not just some vague, general, abstract human being. He has to be a particular human being, and he came as a Jewish man. He was circumcised on the eighth day. He went up to the temple three times a year. He kept kosher. He came as a Jewish man. And this puts great honor on the Jewish people. We can't go too far despising Jews when we realize that our Savior lived like that. Our Savior walked the earth keeping these laws, not keeping the exaggerations of the Pharisees, but keeping all that God really commanded in the Mosaic law. Jesus kept that. This honors the Jewish people. In this way, he became a servant to the circumcised. And then secondly, he served the Jews by, where did he live? As a baby, he has a little short trip to Egypt. And during his ministry, he steps outside the boundary of Israel to try to get a rest for a minute. And that's it. His ministry is to Jews, and a couple Samaritans, and a Roman here and there. It's basically 99% to Jews inside of Israel. That's who he served. That's who he preached to. That's who he healed. The miracles that he did, he did within Israel. And when, in the Gospel of John, some Greeks want to see Jesus, Jesus says, oh, it's time for me to be glorified. For him, that's a signal that his mission is about to take a radical change when Greeks want to talk to him. because he came as a servant to the Jews. So Jesus became a servant to the circumcision in who he was and in what he did. And he did it to show God's truthfulness, that is, to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs. Matthew draws this out. So much of Jesus's life was predetermined by what is in the Old Testament. Where is Jesus going to be born? Already set. Has to be Bethlehem. That he's going to go down to Egypt. Already set. That he's going to settle in Nazareth. Already implied. That he's going to then move down to the Sea of Galilee for his ministry. That's to fulfill Isaiah. That he's going to teach in parables. That he's going to be abandoned by the apostles. He knows that because it's already in the Old Testament. And they're wrong when they say, oh, no, no, no, not us. No, it's already written. You will abandon me tonight. So much of Jesus's life is already laid out in the promises given to Israel. And so he comes, and he fulfills them to show that God is true. And Paul here has it particularly in mind, not the prophecies I've just been mentioning, but the great starting point with the patriarchs, that is, with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I had a great week. I got to talk with a variety of Jewish people about the Scriptures this week, more than once. Several conversations. And one, I'm sitting there, and we're looking through Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac. Always a disturbing passage. And we're reading through to the end, and we kind of read quickly over the end. I said, whoa, whoa, whoa, go back and read that verse again. Because you've done this in your descendants, all the families of the earth will be blessed. It's not the first time God said that to Abraham. It's the first thing he says to Abraham, Genesis 12. It's one of these last things he says to Abraham in Genesis 22. Then he repeats it to Isaac. In your descendants, all the world will be blessed. He repeats it to Jacob. In your descendants, all the world will be blessed. I have met Jews in this neighborhood who say what offends me about Judaism is how narrow it is. And I say, good, but don't turn away from Torah yet. Follow the story on to its intended conclusion. Now, to be a people for the Messiah to come to, so that, yes, God is true to the patriarchs. How are you going to be true to the patriarchs? By showing mercy to the Gentiles. By becoming the one who spreads his blessing to all the families of the earth. Christ served the circumcision to show that God is true. That's an honor to the Jewish people. It's who he was. It's an honor to God. We can all see that he's true. He makes promises and he keeps them. And then it says Christ showed God's truthfulness by showing mercy to the Gentiles, verse 9. Now you could read that sentence, verses 8 and 9, several times and not be entirely sure how to fit it together. One commentator called it a syntactic horror. Another said, oh, it's not a horror. It's just awkward. And it's awkward because he's trying to say that in the church, Jews and Gentiles are equals, and yet there's still a certain Jewish priority. And in trying to say that, things get a little awkward. Christ first shows God's truthfulness, and he serves the Jews in doing so. Who's had the true God this whole time? Jews have had it. They have known who God is. And he showed God's truth by showing mercy to Gentiles. Now that's contrary to a fair amount of rabbinic expectation. That's contrary to a fair amount of lived Jewish experience, that the hope is for God to show mercy to Gentiles. After all, what did the Jews celebrate at Hanukkah? They're celebrating when they fought and they drove the Syrians out of the temple and out of Israel. They won the battle. What are they celebrating at Perm? Well, that they won all the city battles and all the riots against in the Persian Empire. And what did David do with Goliath? He didn't convert Goliath. He knocks him out with a rock. He cuts his head off with his sword. And then he walks around the rest of the day holding the head. You can go back and read it. By the end of the day, he's still got the head, baby. All right, look what I did. That's what he does to Goliath. And Jesus, or rather the Messiah, is the son of David. So what are you thinking he's going to do? To you, you're thinking, look, we're occupied again. And this is the son of David. His job isn't to show mercy to Gentiles. His job is to drive them out of here. And so, of course, we need a string of Old Testament quotations. That's what you need to have next. You need to have a string of Old Testament quotations to say, no, contrary to what you're thinking, this is God's plan. This is the plan of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to show mercy to the Gentiles. Because it's in that Abrahamic promise, which is repeated so prominently to Isaac and to Jacob. And so he says here, you see the four quotations. I invite you to have that open in front of you. He says, every portion of the Old Testament shows that this is the plan. As you look at those four quotations, you see the key word that strings them together. The key word is Gentiles. It's in all four of them. Gentiles, that is nations. ethnic, ethnicities. The other key word that's in all of them is either praise or hope. So that's where he's getting these verses from. I want places that say praise and Gentiles. But he's not picking them out of obscurity. No, these are prominent quotations. One is from the Torah. Two are from the prophets. And two are from the writings, because one in two places. Now, the Torah, the prophets, and the writings are how Jews break down their scriptures. When they say Old Testament, when they say Tanakh, the whole thing, they have three parts to it. The Torah, the prophets, and the writings. And so he quotes from the Torah and the prophets, both the former and the latter prophets, and from the writings. He's saying, this is God's plan. And you'll notice the first and the fourth quotation is either the voice of the Messiah or about the Messiah. And the second and the third focus on the Gentiles praising. And let's look just a little bit more at each one. The first one is what we sang to begin, Psalm 18. You first get that verse, the whole psalm, in 2 Samuel 22. And it says there, when the Lord had delivered David from all his enemies and from the hand of Saul, David said this. And you get this long song. The Lord is my rock and my refuge. I have had many enemies, and God has delivered me. And you come to the end, people serve me whom I never knew. No sooner do they hear than they obey. The foreigners come cringing out of their forts to me. And then you have this verse. I praise my God among the Gentiles." That's the voice of David. David is so delivered from his enemies that he can praise God in the midst of the Gentiles. And the next verse, he could well have quoted, says, God brings salvation to his king. He shows steadfast love to his anointed, to his Messiah, to David and his offspring forever. So he's grabbing this verse. The next verse speaks of what God will do for his Christ, his Messiah. That ends the psalm. And that is kind of one of the closing words on David's life. As you think about David, as you read 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, you read a lot about David. And this psalm and these verses are right at the end to kind of give you David's summation thought, that what God did for David and what God will continue to do for his anointed, for his king, for David's offspring. Now, note this. It's there in a psalm. And again, it's a prominent psalm because it appears twice. It's 2 Samuel 22. It's Psalm 18. And are the psalms important at the ends of the books? It's easy when you read Samuel to say, just give me the action. Let me skip this. Is there any action? No, no, no. I'm going to skip this. Let's go on to the next thing that happens here. But the psalms are important, as is shown by where he quotes next. He says, and again it is said, rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people. And you have to go down the footnote to know where that's from. That is from Torah, Deuteronomy 32, verse, I think it's 43. And there is the song of Moses. Now, the song of Moses was intended to be the part of the Torah that you learn as a kid. In Deuteronomy 32, it's God says to Moses, you're going to die now. And then the people are going to sin. So teach them this song so that they will remember what the Lord has done for them and what the Lord calls them to do. Notice, the power of music has been known for millennia. I got an email from my sister recently. Ah, I got this song in my head. I can't get it out. Yes, people have the experience. And so God said to Moses, yeah, use that insidious power of music, to get stuck in your head, to teach them this song, so that they would always remember what God did, and what they did, and what they should do. That's the Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32. And that's pretty much the end of the Torah, because after that, Moses blesses them and he dies. Torah's over. So you can see how prominent this song is. It's what they're supposed to memorize. It's what they're supposed to remember. It's the executive summary. It's the cliff notes. And so Paul here has quoted it three times in the last six chapters of Romans. As he quotes the Old Testament, he has repeatedly quoted the Song of Moses, which is appropriate because it was meant to be the central point that you're supposed to memorize. And he says, notice this. It said, rejoice, nations. Rejoice, Gentiles, with his people. Not an obscure place. And that's a prominent place, right at the end of the Torah, the song that sums it up, just like David's song, sums up the life of David. Now you go on to verse 11. Here you have Psalm 117. You want to know, how do I choose psalms? Well, often, if they're in the passage, that's a pretty easy way to choose them. So we'll end with Psalm 117. Psalm 117 stands out because, first of all, it's the shortest chapter in the Bible. When kids want to get out of family worship quickly, They can say, let's sing Psalm 117. It's also prominent because it's the next to the last of the Psalms that they would always sing at Passover. 113 to 118 are the Hallel Psalms, you sing them at Passover. And so it's right before the Psalm about the cornerstone that Jesus highlighted. And you notice here there's a further advance. It says, in this very short Psalm, Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples extol him. And there's an advance here. It's not just Gentiles praising God with his people. Now the Gentiles have basically become his people. You don't hear about two groups. Now it's one group all together as we advance the thought of Gentiles coming to praise God. And so finally, he quotes from Isaiah chapter 11. This is what we read. He keeps quoting Isaiah as he goes through the end of Romans. He says, the root of Jesse, that's the Messiah. Jesse was David's father. So if you're the root of Jesse, you're Jesse's descendant, David's descendant. The Messiah will come. Even he who arises to rule the Gentiles, that makes you think of one thing. He's going to rule those Gentiles. No, it says, in him the Gentiles will hope. The one the Gentiles will hope in, that's an entirely different picture. That's someone that the Gentiles will praise. So Jesus showed God is true by showing mercy to the Gentiles. And that might not have been what the Jews were expecting, but that's their fault, he says, because it's in every portion of the scripture, in prominent places, like the Song of Moses at the end of the Torah, or the big psalm at the end of David's life, or here in this short psalm, or there, very obviously, in Isaiah. So he's saying to them, what are we supposed to do with this? Jesus came as a servant of the circumcised, Welcome the Jewish believers into the church, believers in Jesus. Don't look down on them. And don't look down in the other direction either, Jewish believers. The whole plan was for God to bring in the Gentiles to praise his name as well. So verse 13, he gives us a prayer, a wish to guide us. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing. So that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope. He says, may this unity between Jew and Gentile happen. May it happen among you. May it happen among us. One God created us all in his image. One God has torn down the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile. May we be a part of his great plan. And so that was what would glorify God and glorifies God here. when whatever differences you can think of and name socioeconomically or racially are broken down and we praise God together. Whether Jew and Gentile, or American and immigrant, or rich and poor, or black and white, whatever difference you want to come up with, it glorifies God. When we don't retreat to our corners, we praise God with one and unified voice. He says, we're not to let our divisions ruin our joy. arguing ruins joy. But he speaks here of unity. And you'll see how he uses that word hope. In Jesus will the Gentiles hope, so may the God of hope. Elsewhere he says Gentiles have been without hope because without God. But now that we have hope, may he fill you with all joy and peace in believing. Jesus, the night he was betrayed, said, believe in me as you believe in God. And then he said, my peace I give to you. And then he said, my joy I give to you. These are the gifts of Jesus to us. That as we believe in him, he gives us love and peace and joy and the great gift that he spoke about. The reason he had to go, he said, was so that he could give the comforter to us. the comforter, the Holy Spirit, he says. These are great gifts of Jesus, why he has to go. So he gives us the Holy Spirit and gives us his peace and his joy as we believe in him. And so it says, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing. And that completes this section on unity. It almost summarizes the book. And so our takeaway is this. We are to fulfill God's purpose. by rejoicing in God together. It's easy to come in, and you have a little bit of a wall up. And that wall can just kind of stay up, even while you're polite. But this says, rejoice and glorify God by rejoicing in God together. It takes active work. to take down the walls and build connections. It requires talking. Yeah, but a little talking in church, that's the first step. It requires eating together. Talk more. More relaxed. It requires praying. And we can find this to be scary, and probably the more so, the more different we feel. One fun thing I get to do as a pastor, most of the time I don't get out much on Sunday morning. I'm right here. But once in a while, I get an assignment, and I'm sent to go to another church and be on the visitation team. That is to say, do the occasional checkup on the congregation. So I do this every three or four years. I'm assigned. And so the last one that I did, I was talking to a new young couple in a church in our presbytery, and you could tell at a glance that this young couple was different from the other people there. You could just tell, OK, you are coming from a different background, different socioeconomic kind of niche. And so the man in the family was talking to me. He said, you know, every time we get invited over to lunch, I've always been nervous. I mean, I've gone, but I've always been nervous going, like, is this going to be awkward? I'm so different. And then every time, he said, every time it's just been a blessing. These people have been so loving and so welcoming and have made me feel so much at home. You know, that's how it's supposed to be. That's what this is talking about. That is how we glorify God by rejoicing in Him together. And so may the God of hope give you this blessing as well. I'm going to go beyond that. I just don't want the God of Hope to give you this blessing. May the God of Hope give somebody else this blessing through you. For then we come to maturity, where we are actively seeking to be not just the ones who accept the invitation and go, you've got to do that, but also the ones who take a turn and issue the invitation and bring others to you. Yes, we are to fulfill God's purpose by rejoicing in God together across various minor theological differences, shall we say, as he says first, and against what may seem like major ethnic and socioeconomic differences as well. May he do it, and may we work to achieve it. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have created us all and that you call us to believe in your Son, Jesus Christ, so that we may no longer be strangers and aliens, but so we may be citizens, and we may be your children, and we may be brothers and sisters. And so Lord, I pray that we would not be slow to enjoy this benefit, but that we would be quick, that we would be strong in the faith, says to enjoy, to extend this welcome, to enjoy it among ourselves, to extend it to others. And so, Lord, we pray that you would be glorified in this ashram, in this place. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.