Hebrews Lesson 163 June 11, 2009
NKJ Proverbs 3:5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart, And lean not on your own understanding;
6 In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He shall direct your paths.
Open your Bibles to Romans 12. It'll be a minute or two before we get there, but that is where we will start with the first verse that we look at. In fact you might hold your finger there wherever else we go because several times tonight we will be coming back to Romans 12.
We're at the end of the teaching section in Hebrews 10 that began actually in Hebrews 7:1. Hebrews 7:1 through Hebrews 10:25 is the teaching section before we get into the warning section, this key section in the book of Hebrews. We've come to the verse that talks about the responsibility that believers have toward one another and in reference to based on verse 25, in reference to the body of Christ, our responsibilities to one another and to meeting together as a body of believers and why that is important, why it is significant.
Hebrews 10:24 says:
NKJ Hebrews 10:24 And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works,
"In order to provoke" could be one way of translating that, or, in order to incite to action, to encourage others to action specifically in terms of love and good works. These two words are simply chosen as a summary of the whole spiritual life. One thing I want to come back to though as we look at this as we started last time studying the Doctrine of One Another, the verb that we have here is katanoeo.
I'm getting distracted in my own mind. The last two days I've been in a Greek in a week class. It's a first year Greek class, but they're teaching a new form of pronunciation based findings in the last. And studies that have been done in the last 15 or 20 years where they have a pretty good idea of how historical Greek was pronounced. By historical Greek that's what they're referring to: Koine Greek as opposed to Attic Greek, which was prior to that and later Byzantine Greek and then Modern Greek. Modern Greek is quite different. There's been a simplification of the language over the last 2,000 years or so, so that vowels specifically tend to flow towards either an "a" or an "e" sound. So whereas you might have several endings (vowel endings) that you have in some Greek words - "ei" is one ending that's a double vowel or a diphthong. You also have an "ada" ending and some others that were distinguished in pronunciation in the Koine period and even in the classical period. In the modern period that disappeared. Now the significance for that is that the subjunctive mood which used an "ada" ending, which would be pronounced more like an "a", and the "ei" ending which I was taught was pronounced the same way would not have been that way in the Koine period because you have to be able to hear the distinction in the sounds to know whether somebody is talking in the indicative mood or in the subjunctive mood. In Modern Greek is when those vowel sounds came together as one. Modern Greek actually dumped the subjunctive mood. It fell out because you couldn't hear the difference anymore between the indicative mood and the subjunctive mood.
Now I thought that was interesting, but other people may not. But they're using this new pronunciation system. I've been sitting there all day listening to a whole new way of pronouncing Greek words. So now when I look at a Greek word, it's like confusion sets into my head.
"Okay. How do I say that now?"
It's been interesting. This guy is teaching. I'm going to it to sort of observe his method. He's teaching first year Greek in basically 22 hours – 2 hours last night, 8 hours today, 8 hours tomorrow, and 4 hours on Saturday morning. So it's rather intensive. I was brain dead at 1 o'clock this afternoon and I know Greek. I'm looking at these other people in there who didn't even know the alphabet until last night.
I'm thinking, "How in the world are these people even assimilating this?"
It's got to be like drinking water out of a fire hose. It completely overwhelms.
Anyway when you look at Hebrews 10:24 and we have this initial verb katanoeo,, it is an intensified form because of the prefix of the kata which is the preposition that is attached to the root verb noeo which is the word for thinking or thought. It is related also to the word phroneo which we will see tonight. You hear the noeo. That's your root. Nous is a word that you've heard before. That's the Greek word for mind. So you move from nous to noeo, and you see the same root. One's a noun; one's a verb - moving from mind to thought or thinking. So you have this group of words like phroneo, katanoeo, hupernoeo, words like that huponoeo, which indicate different ways of talking about thinking, thought and concentration.
The reason I'm bringing that up is when we get into the Romans 12 passage as well as the Ephesians 4 passage that we'll look at under the first couple of new points that we hit tonight, those commands in relation to how we are to treat one another within the body of Christ are surrounded by verbs related to thought and thinking, emphasizing the fact once again that the essence, the core of the Christian life has to do with thought. It doesn't have to do with emotion. It doesn't have to do with how we feel about God. It has to do with thinking in terms of the way God thinks and that the Word of God is given to us so that we can learn to think about God's creation the way He thought about His creation and the way He designed that creation. When our thinking lines up with the way God created and made things, then we are aligned with reality and we're thinking in terms of reality. But when we think differently, when our thinking is divorced from the creation as He's made it, then the further we get from the way things are as He defined them, the more we get into a fantasy world. We're just making up our own ideas of the way reality is and we become divorced from reality; and therefore we become more and more irrational.
So at the very essence when you think about thought systems such as other worldviews (Marxism, eastern religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, the various forms of mysticism), you think in terms of humanism, secular humanism, and atheism - these various worldviews. They all are going to have elements of truth in them because they're living in God's world. So they have to some degree operate on truth as it is because otherwise they would be walking of the edge of buildings and falling to their death and things of that nature. So at least 50% I would think to 70% of any thought system is going to have to fit with reality. But it's the other 10, 15, 20, 30% that is what distorts the rest of it into a different way of looking at things. So the more error there is in the thought system, the more divorced from reality people are.
So often I get the question: how in the world can people believe that? Well, you're asking for a rational explanation based on the absolute truth of God's Word for people who have rejected God's Word. They're suppressing truth in unrighteousness, operating in a fantasy world, which by definition is irrational. So how can we ask for a rational explanation for irrational behavior? We can't unless we assume what the irrational person has assumed in terms of their worldview. Ultimately everything comes back to thinking a certain way and that thinking has to fit a standard.
That's what the word consider means is to think. It means to contemplate to meditate. It means to give careful and conscious thought to something, intentional thought to something.
It's not just something that, "Well this idea just sort of occurred to me. Maybe we ought to do this."
No, it's the idea of sitting down and giving intentional thought to a particular issue. Here it is that we are to consider, give thought to a course of action - how we can stimulate, excite, challenge, stir up, people to a course of action. In other words, pursuing spiritual maturity.
So that led us into looking at the various passages in Scripture that talk about the believer's responsibility to other members of the royal family of God – royal family of God being a term to describe believers in the Lord Jesus Christ who are part of the body of Christ who Scriptures say are adopted into God's family at the instant of salvation. We are adopted into His family. We are heirs of God and so there is a unique privilege that we all share as members of the royal family of God. We've all been given the same resources. We've all been the same beneficiaries of God's grace in terms of what Christ did for us at the cross. We are all indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. We all benefit from the filling of God the Holy Spirit. We've all been given certain spiritual gifts. We are all equally valuable as members of God's royal family.
So there is a code of conduct, a code of behavior that is mandated by the Word of God on all members of the family. This is how members of God's family behave toward one another. It is a family relationship. So if you have positive views of family (Some people don't because of their background); but if you have positive views of a solid healthy family; then you understand something about the kind of relationship that believer's should have to one another. We are members of the same family. We're not strangers; we're not foreigners. We are all members of God's family. Only believers are members of God's family.
Doctrine of One Another
- So the first principle that we looked at last time was that the word for one another translates the Greek word allelon, which simply means to refer to one person towards others within a group. It is one to another or one another. Most of the New Testament contexts are addressed to congregations so it's speaking to how people within a congregation as the micro representation of the body of Christ, the physical or concrete representation of the body of Christ before us as well as to others outside of a local body of believers. So the idea is how believers within these congregations should treat other believers within the congregation. By extension this then applies to all other believers.
- I pointed out as a second point that the most common command for "one another" is to love one another which is stated 15 times in the New Testament. I believe that all of the other "one anothers" that we have in the New Testament define different aspects of what it means to love one another. Loving one another isn't generating certain kinds of feelings toward other believers. It's not that idea because sometimes you don't even know another person sitting across the congregation and generating some kind of feeling toward them is based on having some sort of interaction with them. If it's a negative interaction, it might produce negative feelings. If it has a positive interaction, then it would produce positive feelings. But the issue is divorced from feeling, and it's based on character.
Yesterday or the day before, I went out to a small local nursery that I was told about and met a very interesting guy who has this small nursery that nobody would probably ever pay much attention to. He's very knowledgeable about plants and all kinds of things. And he's a believer. He came over. We bought some plants. He brought them, delivered them to the house.
As he left he said, "Next time I see you, I want you to answer a question for me." He said, "I know God loves me all the time. But there are sometimes when I just don't feel like I'm very lovable. Now why does God love me?"
See that's a question a lot of people ask because they are often basing their concept of love on #1 emotion and #2 their behavior. What the Bible teaches is that God's love for us is not based on anything that is in us, anything that we've done or haven't done. It's not based on our failures or our successes. It's not based on our obedience or our disobedience, our morality, our immorality, our talents, our gifts. It's not based on any of those factors because frankly everything that we have is from God. It is based solely and exclusively on who He is and on His character. That's why that love never changes. It never increases. It never decreases. As a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, we're not only recipients of God's (what we might call His) unconditional love or sometimes impersonal love. His unconditional love emphasizes the fact that it's not based on conditions of behavior on our part. The fact that it's impersonal means that a personal relationship is not necessary because God doesn't have a personal relationship with unbelievers.
Yet God loved the whole world in such a way that He sent His Son, His unique Son to die on the cross for all unbelievers. So it's not based on a personal relationship. It is based though on knowledge and on integrity. So when we come to these commands that we are to love one another as Christ loved the church, it means that we have to understand something about integrity and we have to understand something about the basis for that love. The basis for that love for us in terms of that horizontal relationship between one believer and another believer is not based on either who I am as the one loving or the other person as the one who is loved because my character has flaws and their character has flaws and there will be failures on both sides.
There will be days that you wake up and you don't feel like loving anybody. I know two people in this congregation that I don't really believe that's true. I've never seen that. Maybe their husbands or wives could tell me. But we have a couple of people here that I'm just not sure they have a sin nature. That's another story.
But for most of us we have days when we wake up and we just don't really believe that we could love anybody. We frankly don't want to love anybody. That's a good day just to stay home and not interact with anybody. Other days we wake up and we're feeling very good. We're in a good mood and we feel like we can love other people and we just love everybody. But there's this flux that takes place based on all kinds of different things that are going on with us biologically, emotionally, and spiritually that affect that. So there is that ebb and flow in terms of emotions.
But for love to have the kind of meaning that God's love has which is the basis for the kind of love that we are to have towards other people; it has to be based on something that doesn't change, something that's not in a state of flux, something that is not mutable. So the love that we have for other believers is not supposed to be based on our own character or even our own spiritual maturity. It must be based on an understanding of God's character, who He is, and what He's done for us and for others through Christ on the cross.
Those other people that we look at, sometimes we look and say, "I just can't understand why God wants me to love them. Look at what they've done to me. They have betrayed me. They have abused me. They have mistreated me and sometimes in horrible, horrible ways. How in the world can God expect me to love that person? That is beyond my capability."
Well, that's right. This kind of love as I pointed out last time is part of the fruit of the Spirit. It's the Holy Spirit who produces that in us as we grow and mature. Part of growing and maturing is understanding who God is, and understanding the nature of His love, and the fact that in terms of His justice, you who are have trouble loving that unlovable person are just as obnoxious and unlovable toward the righteousness of God as that person you can't love is to you.
So we get in this high and mighty state of arrogance where we say, "I can't really love that person. Look at what they've done to me."
We've missed the whole point. The point is God loved them just as much as He loves you. As far as God's concerned, you're not any better as a dirty rotten, fallen, depraved sinner than they are; and you're no more deserving of God's love and I'm no more deserving of God's love than anybody else is. So we have to understand the nature of that love that we are to emulate.
Jesus said, "We are to love one another as I have loved you."
So that puts the standard onto a more stable and immutable foundation. Now this command to love one another as I pointed out last time pervades the New Testament. John, Paul, and Peter each mention this. It's based primarily on Jesus giving a new commandment, John 13:34-35, which is the main verse we looked at last time. Then I looked at all the other verses related to loving one another.
The basis, the pattern, the model is to understand how God loves us. That takes a lifetime to understand as a believer because that is the whole process of studying God's Word and learning about and observing the patterns of God's behavior toward His creatures. In the Old Testament we have the adoption of the nation Israel as God's precious possession. So we look at how God deals with Israel in love. See that automatically challenges most people's understanding of what love is because they would think that if somebody loves me and they did to me what God does to Israel in terms of discipline; then how can that be love? That's because people have a deluded, shallow, superficial and emotional view of what love is; and it doesn't have any room for true righteousness judgment or discipline from the framework of a righteous God who has complete integrity and complete knowledge.
So love is not just this warm, fuzzy, emoted, sentimental Hallmark card, feel-good kind of thing, which has come to characterize what many Americans, what our pop culture envisions as love. It is much more complex and much more profound than that. So the more we study all through the Scripture and we observe God's patterns of behavior towards those He loves, then we come to understand what love is all about.
Same thing when you get into the New Testament and the ultimate example of God's love is John 3:16: "God loved the world in this way that He gave His unique Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."
NKJ Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Jesus said:
NKJ John 15:13 "Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends.
So that's the pattern for understanding what love is. It ultimately starts with God. It doesn't start with those kinds of feelings that you had when you were 15 years old and had your first crush on some boy or some girl. It's not related to the kind of love that you experienced in your home. It's not related to any other sort of human experience. But that's always the frame of reference for understanding love for most people - something within their experience.
For the believer, we have to get out of our experience and go into the Word of God and there we come to understand what real love is all about. Love involves as I pointed out in the third point…
- The third point for "one another" has to do with encouraging one another. A key verse there was Romans 1:12 where Paul as an apostle puts himself in a position that he is encouraged by the believers in the church in Rome and he will encourage them. So there is this mutuality within the body of Christ. Also 1 Thessalonians 4:18. We are to comfort one another with these words specifically speaking about the fact that Jesus Christ will return and at some future time with the rapture there will be a reuniting of those who have died physically with those who are still alive. 1 Thessalonians 5:11 says the same kind of thing.
NKJ 1 Thessalonians 5:11 Therefore comfort each other and edify one another,
We'll see that in another category.
just as you also are doing.
So here we have these words based on the word group parakaleo. You have sumparakaleo. Sum is a prepositional prefix which intensifies the word there. Sum means together with so it emphasizes again the coming together with one another.
Then 1 Thessalonians 4:18 and 5:11 use the word parakaleo. It has that idea of encouraging, challenging, helping, aiding, assisting one another.
Now we come to the fourth point. This is why you're in Romans 12.
- We are members of one another.
Now that's a difficult concept for us to get into our heads (that we are members of one another) because that directly challenges a certain mentality that we as American have built into the way we think. We studied this in the past that every person born in whatever country – I'll use China or India versus the United States – you're in, whatever that worldview is, you grow up from the time that you are in the cradle and you are trained by various factors to think about reality a certain way. Each culture has its different patterns. If you grow up in a pagan culture – an eastern culture such as China or India - where ultimate reality is just this sort of nirvana nothingness that is out there. Ultimate reality isn't personal. It is infinite; but it's not personal, then ultimately death is being absorbed into that impersonal blob that's out there and you lose all sense of self-consciousness. So self is not a category that is important.
But if you're born in the United States of America, self is very important. Each individual is emphasized and we have a value based on our history, based on our culture to emphasize the importance of the individual and the individual's talents and abilities so that they can have the freedom (historically at least in the United States) to have the freedom to choose to do whatever they want to with the talents and abilities that God gave them.
To have real freedom you have to free to succeed and to have to also be free to fail. To the degree that you limit the freedom to fail (through government cushions), you also have to limit people's freedom to succeed. We're seeing great examples of that right now in our country as we're not letting various corporations fail and experience the results of their bad decisions, their foolish decisions and in some cases criminal decisions.
Then on the other hand we're coming along and we're going to now limit (or there are people who think that we ought to limit) the degree to which people can be compensated in certain jobs, in certain positions. So you cut off the motivation to succeed at some level because somebody thinks somebody else makes too much money. So you have the government coming in and wanting to limit freedom.
But historically in the U. S. there has been this emphasis on individualism. This was built into our national psyche during the years of the frontier where people would leave everybody behind. They might be 16, 17 years of age, getting on a wagon train. They might never again see their family. Life for them was going to be what they made of it and they were going to head out into the West and they were going to make their own life. It was up to them and their own resources. They were going to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. So this emphasis on the individual and the individual's ability is stressed highly in our culture.
But when you come to passages like this in Scripture it becomes difficult for us to identify this sort of corporate thinking that you have that we are members of one another, that there is an interrelationship and interdependency among believers in the body of Christ because we're trained as Americans to think in terms of independency; whereas you have people from some other cultures and they only think in terms of the village or they only think in terms of the family or the group. So every decision they make is made on the basis of a family and the impact it has on the family. They never really think of it in terms of themselves as an individual. These are different ways in which the culture around us, and the worldview that we absorb from teachers, peers, parents, professors through life, shapes our thinking.
So look at Romans 12:1 just to give you background on this before we get into a couple of passages here. Paul says:
NKJ Romans 12:1 I beseech you
Or challenge you
therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice,
Now he uses the word body because he's talking about the whole person. He's avoiding some sort of Greek type of thinking that would say, "Okay, I'm going to give my body to one thing but I'm going to give my mind to something else." He's using the body because it stands for the whole person.
holy,
That means set apart to God.
acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service
The idea in the Greek there is that this is our service as part of believers once we're saved to serve God.
Now he describes the basis for this and how this is done in verse 2. It involves two commands, a negative and then a positive.
First of all he says:
NKJ Romans 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Now that's hard for us because everybody in this room was significantly conformed to the thinking of the culture and the world around them before they were saved. I was saved when I was 6. But the problem that we have is that when we have a sin nature, that sin nature has an affinity for the characteristics of any cosmic thought, any worldview, pagan worldview. So by the time we are 3, 4, 5 years of age we have already absorbed a mindset that is counter to the Word of God because the only option we have as a spiritually dead sinner dominated by a sin nature is to adopt thinking that is contrary to God. So we are reared in an environment where we have a soul that is oriented to antagonism to God and conformity to the spirit of the age.
Literally that's the word there for world. It's not kosmos but ionos. Instead we are to be transformed by the renewing of the mind. It is thinking. That's where it starts because that's the problem.
Our "thought forms" as well as the "thought content" is characterized by paganism. Now that really gets people sort of twisted inside out if you start thinking about how you think. It's very difficult to think about how you think because it is sort of like a fish being in water. You don't know what it's like to be in air because you've always been surrounded by water. As a fallen sinner your thinking was always shaped by a pagan worldview of one form or another and characterized by sin. So to think in terms of those structures that were basically embedded, adopted, absorbed into your thinking before you were saved is extremely difficult because that forms the habits of your mind. It structured your mind long before you were conscious of how you were thinking and what you were thinking.
I had a seminary professor who once said, "It's hard enough for most people to think, but it's almost impossible for most people to think about how they think."
That's true. It takes a lot of effort and training, teaching and consciousness and conscientiousness to think about how you think. There are people in this world who never do think about what they think in terms of content, much less how they think. But you can think the wrong way and have right thoughts. It's like saying that a right thing must be done in a right way; but a right thing can be done in a wrong way. Well, a right thing in terms of a morality system can be done in a wrong way in terms of a thought framework.
See you have some great moral principles in some cults. Take the example Mormonism. They emphasize the family. They have a strong emphasis on marriage. They distort that in polygamy, but we'll not get off on that tonight. But they have understood certain principles about what we would call divine institution #1 which is individual responsibility, divine institution #2 which is marriage, divine institution #3 which is family. They understand that. But it is encapsulated within a way of thinking that actually distorts all three of those. So at the surface it looks like they've got the details right; but because it's in a web that is distorted, those details really aren't right. They are trying to do a right thing the wrong way. A right thing done the wrong way is wrong. So right thoughts thought in a wrong framework is wrong. Maybe you never thought of it that way before. I can tell for some of you, I have already lost you, so let's get a little more concrete.
We'll look at the Word here.
NKJ Romans 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
The main thing I want you to notice and you can circle or underline that word "mind" because it's emphasizing thought. The word there in the Greek is the word nous, which is the standard word for the mind, for the place where thinking takes place within the soul.
Then in verses 3 through 8 he's going to make his first application. See what's happened in Romans in terms of this letter is the first 11 chapters dealt with the righteousness of God in terms of the unjustified sinner in the first three chapters and how they become justified in chapter 4, reconciliation of the one justified in chapter 5; 6 through 8 is how the justified sinner is supposed to live. Nine, 10 and 11 deal with how God's justice relates to His previous promises to Israel. In chapter 12:1 he says, "Therefore in light of God's righteousness and justice and what He has done to justified sinners; how then are you to take that (all this heavy doctrine that I've taught, been explaining for 11 chapters, how do you take that) and put it into application? That's how Paul normally handled things.
So he comes to the therefore in 12:1 and now he begins to get down to what most people would call real good practical application. He sets it up in terms of changing the way you think in verses 1 and 2. Then in 3 through 8 he's going to apply that in terms of this new relationship that we all have with one another as members of the royal family of God. He's going to build that in relationship using this whole image of a body as a metaphor that we are part of that body and just as each part of our physical bodies has a different function and a different purpose and some may be more obvious in terms of it's significance and importance than other parts; but all of it is important.
Many of us came through, grew up in a time period when we were taught that tonsils and the appendix were vestigial organs. Do you remember that? They weren't important at all. Just take them out. I came along just about the time they stopped doing that so I still have my tonsils. I begged doctors when I was in college "Take them out please." Nobody would ever do that because what they discovered later was that both the appendix and tonsil have something to do with the immune system and taking care of toxins in the body and things of that nature. They're important. They're not just insignificant left over pieces of evolution. God has an actual reason and purpose for tonsils and for the appendix. So every body part is important. It just has different functions. Just because your function isn't that of the brain, your function is that of the little finger or your function is that of the little toe or the big toe. Without the right toes you have trouble with balance, other things of that nature. Paul is going to use that analogy to talk about the different gifts that God has given to each believer within the makeup of the local body. That means that everybody's important.
We have to think in terms of two things here. I want you to think in terms of the overall universal church, the universal body of Christ. That's all believers through time. That's every believer from the time of the first day of Pentecost when the church was birthed when the Holy Spirit came in Acts 2 all the way to the rapture. Every believer, every person who trusts in Jesus Christ all through that time are part of that body of Christ. Now some are dead. They have already lived and have died and they've gone to be with the Lord. Others have not yet been saved. Some have not yet been born physically. They will at some future time. Every single one has been given a spiritual gift and their function is vital to the body of Christ.
But some believer who lived in Ephesus in the 3rd century whose name we don't know is just as important to the body of Christ as you are, but not at the same time.
I'm really twisting your brains tonight; but what we're going to do is talk about time, and then we're going to talk about space. And I'm going to draw an analogy between the time layout and the spatial factor. The time I'm showing you that God gave certain gifts at the very beginning. Apostles and prophets were limited to the foundation of the church, Ephesians 4:4.
But all of the other gifts are fully operational all through the history of the church so that in every time frame in the 3rd century, in the 4th century, 5th century, all the way up to the 21st century there are always believers who have the gift of leadership, the gift of mercy, the gift of pastor-teacher, the gift of evangelist. They're spread out diachronically, that is chronologically down through the ages.
At the same time God looks spatially in terms of time segments for example the first part of the 21st century and He's going to distribute the spiritual gifts across that same time period as well as spatially. By that I means in terms of a local church, so that we not only talk about the spiritual gifts in terms of the universal body of Christ throughout the last 20 centuries, but we're also talking about the fact that in local assemblies God is going to give a distribution of spiritual gifts. He's not going to have a local assembly over here that only has the gifts of evangelism and pastor teacher and this assembly over here has maybe one person with the gift of pastor teacher and everybody else has the gift of helps or leadership or administration. There is going to be a spread of these gifts.
So if you look at West Houston Bible Church we're going to have a congregation as members of the body of Christ that are going spread of spiritual gifts, whatever the proportion is that God believes is important for us to have. We're going to have some with the gift of helps, some with the gift of mercy, some with the gift of leadership, some with the gifts of giving, and these are all important for the function of this localized body of believers.
You go to some other congregation. They have the same thing. Those gifts are important to the function of that localized body of believers so that the gifts are operational and significant not just for the total universal body of Christ, but also for each individual local body of believers.
That means that every single believer in the localized version of the body of Christ that meets at West Houston Bible Church is important to the function of that body. There is no one here that is not important or significant for the function of the body. So when people are not present or they're not involved or they just come and sneak in at the last minute and leave right away afterwards and they're not part of the body; not only does the body miss the opportunity of being ministered to, edified by their spiritual gift, but also that person misses out on the opportunity to be involved in serving that local body of believers in terms of the spiritual gift that God gave them for the purpose of serving in that local church. So maybe that gives you a greater understanding of the importance and the role that we all play within the health of that body.
Now of course you have people within a local congregation that have different levels of maturity. You have some believers that are more mature so their gift if more evident, more operational. You have others who are less mature so their gift is not as obvious and not as operational. But it will become so as they grow and mature. So that's some background to help you think through the next couple of verses.
So in verse 3 Paul says:
NKJ Romans 12:3 For I say, through the grace given to me,
That's a reference to his apostolic gifts, which are involved in giving revelation from God.
to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly.
"Of himself" is added for clarity in the English.
than he ought to think, but to think soberly,
That doesn't mean with the absence of alcoholic beverages. The word sober there has to do with objectively in terms of reality. The only way you can get the terms of reality is when you have the Word of God in your thinking. So we're to think honestly about who we are, not with either a false humility or saying, "You know, I really can't do that." and you know you can; but you just don't want it to appear as if you're promoting yourself; or, on the other hand always promoting yourself in terms of an overt arrogance. Pseudo humility is just as arrogant as overt arrogance is so the Scripture says we are to think objectively and accurately about whom we are and we can only do that when we're evaluating ourselves from an objective standard like the Word of God. So we're not to think more highly than we ought to think but to think soberly or accurately or objectively.
as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith
What that indicates it that there are different proportions of how God distributes the spiritual gifts. Some person may have the gift of pastor-teacher, but he has three quarts. Another person has the gift of pastor-teacher and he has three bushels. Another person may have the gift of giving and they have a couple of gallons. Somebody else has the gift of giving, but it's only a quart. We've all experienced that. We have listened to pastors who have just obviously tremendously gifted by God. I've been under and heard others who we know have the gift of pastor-teacher, but it's not as remarkable as someone else. So there is a difference in degree of distribution which is what Paul refers to there.
Then in verse 4 he says:
NKJ Romans 12:4 For as we have many members in one body,
That emphasizes the distinction and importance of every individual. We have many members, but there is one body of Christ. We are all part of a greater whole.
but all the members do not have the same function,
Then in verse 5 he says:
NKJ Romans 12:5 so we, being many,
Once again talking about the many individuals.
are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another.
Now if you stop and think about that, that is an important concept that we lost: that we are member of one another. We do not exist as individual Christians existing in isolated islands totally separated from other believers. Now that runs counter to the kind of thinking that characterizes American individualism. I'm not saying that there's not a place, a role for thinking in terms of people's individual abilities and their own self-reliance. But in the body of Christ that is not the pattern. The pattern is that we are members of one another and there is interdependency in the body of Christ from one member to another because we're designed as a team. That's probably the best analogy that most of us can comprehend.
We're like a super bowl Dallas Cowboys team back in the 60's and 70's where every player worked well with every other player. It was like a well-oiled machine. Every part was important and every part functioned individually; but the whole team was successful only when everybody worked together as a whole. You see the same kind of thing in any sort of team operation. You can't have one person exerting himself or elevating himself as being more important than others. They all work together.
Then Paul goes on to describe 7 different spiritual gifts in this particular passage.
Before I move on, one thing I didn't highlight; but back in verse 3 Christ said:
NKJ Romans 12:3 For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think
Emphasizing the word thinking again. Here it shifts to the word huperphoneo, which is emphasizing the thinking, the concentration.
of himself more highly than he ought to think,
Again we have the word phroneo.
but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith.
So three times in that one verse there's an emphasis on thought, the importance of accurate objective thinking. That then becomes a part of how the individual members interface with one another.
Then starting in verse 6 there's a list of various spiritual gifts. None of the lists that we have in Scripture, I believe, are exhaustive of the spiritual gifts; they are a representative. In this list we have prophecy, ministry or service to the local body of Christ, teacher. I think there is a difference between someone who is a gifted teacher and someone who is a pastor-teacher. The pastor-teacher is one who has a responsibility towards a congregation and the pastor emphasizes the leadership aspect because it's based on the word for shepherd. That's what a shepherd did. He had a responsibility for leading and taking care of a flock of sheep. So the gift of pastor-teacher is someone who has that gift of leadership to oversee a congregation and take care of a congregation. He does it primarily through teaching. But that's different from someone else who may have a gift of teaching.
I have studied under some great teachers in my time in seminary education - tremendous academics, tremendous knowledge, but not necessarily men who would make good pastors because they didn't have that sort of leadership gift. But they had great abilities to teach. There are people in every congregation who have the ability to teach and can teach in Sunday school with kids, can teach other adults; but they don't have that gift of pastor-teacher. So you have the gift of teaching. You have the gift of exhortation, which is really to challenge. It's that word parakaleo again, to exhort, to challenge, to comfort, to encourage, the gift of giving, the gift of leadership with diligence, the gift of mercy. These are the 7 gifts that are listed here in Romans 12.
Then just as we wrap up the other verse that supports this is over in Ephesians 4.
NKJ Ephesians 4:25 Therefore, putting away lying, "Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor," for we are members of one another.
Now once again you get into a section that emphasizes thought. This begins in verse 17.
In Ephesians Paul follows the same kind of pattern that he followed in Romans. He has more of a teaching instructional, doctrinal, theological section in chapters 1, 2, and 3. In 4, 5 and 6 he gets into what most people today want to call practical things. But for Paul there's nothing more practical than theology. So all practical things start with understanding who God is and what God has provided for us in salvation. Starting in chapter 4, he starts drawing out the implications of this for our behavior. I'm just going to read through these verses and emphasize a couple of things before we get to verse 25.
Paul says:
NKJ Ephesians 4:17 This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind,
What's he saying? Don't be conformed to the world. He saying the same thing he said in Romans 12:2. Don't be conformed to the spirit of the world.
Verse 18 describes their thinking.
NKJ Ephesians 4:18 having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them,
Once again that's a thought concept.
because of the blindness of their heart;
NKJ Ephesians 4:19 who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
NKJ Ephesians 4:20 But you have not so learned Christ,
What's learning? It's thought. It's changing the way we think.
NKJ Ephesians 4:21 if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus:
NKJ Ephesians 4:22 that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts,
What's he saying? He's saying don't be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewing of your thinking which is verse 23.
NKJ Ephesians 4:23 and be renewed in the spirit of your mind,
By being renewed by your emotions…. Is that what that says? No, it says be renewed by the spirit of your mind. It's thought. Change the way you think. Changing the way you think is integral to putting on the new man, which was created according to God in the true righteousness and holiness.
NKJ Ephesians 4:24 and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.
That's not talking about salvation. That's talking about living in light of who you are now in Christ.
NKJ Ephesians 4:25 Therefore,
Conclusion
putting away lying, "Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor," for we are members of one another.
So neighbor there isn't the unbeliever living next door to you. Neighbor there is he's using that as a term for other believers in the body of Christ. We are to speak truth with other believers because we are members of one another. There is this interdependency, interrelationship that every believer has with every other believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. So we are to exercise in terms of that relationship. We are to live out our lives on that basis.
Now the next point we're going to get to next time is to give preference to one another in honor. Now we're going to go back to Romans 12 for that. That's why I spent so much time on the context because we have three verses in Romans 12 that deal with the behavior that we're to have toward one another. This of course will flow out of what he said about humility and not thinking more highly of yourself than you ought to think and this will lead to the application of the principle that we are to give preference to one another in honor.
We'll come back and start there next Thursday night. Let's bow our heads and close in prayer.
Illustrations