Romans 10:8b-13 “The Word is Near”

There was a retired pastor who helped out at the church that I grew up in. He was known as the pastor emeritus, and he helped out with worship (particularly when we had communion), he visited, and occasionally, he preached. I honestly don’t remember much about what he said when he preached, but there is one thing that I remember quite clearly. You see, the church had a choir loft off to the side, and the choir would sit in it throughout the service. And he would be up in the pulpit and for some reason he was more interested in looking out at them than he was at looking towards the rest of the congregation. So he would spend the whole sermon looking to the side, preaching to the choir. It always made me laugh. Of course, I have my own issues with eye contact when I preach, as I tend to look above all of you instead of at you, so who am I to talk.

The truth is that in the many sermons I have preached here, for some reason I have not spent a lot of time preaching the basic gospel message. I haven’t spent a lot of time spelling out God’s great love for us, our great need for salvation, Jesus’ great sacrifice to save us from our sins, and the need for us to accept Christ so that we might know salvation. The truth is that I have avoided preaching this message too often because I don’t want to be preaching to the choir. It is something we all know, it is something that we’ve all heard time and time again, it is something that we believe and accept… so why spend the time repeating it.

But it is a message that is worth repeating. It is a truth that is truly center to who we are as Christians, as Christ’s disciples. And every now and then it is worth hearing that old, old story once again.

Let us open in prayer.

I. The Middle

This last fall I got into a discussion with some friends from high school about God’s love. You see, I made the horrendous claim that God loves everyone and they told me that this made them throw up in their mouth. It seems like this was quite a strong reaction to a truth that is pretty clear throughout the Bible, but that is what happened. They also got upset when I suggested that God wants everyone to be saved. How dare I talk about things that God wants to happen that don’t happen. If God wants something, it will happen, they argue. If it doesn’t happen, then it is not a part of God’s purpose, his plan, or his desire.

Some Christians claim that God loves everyone. They like to point out that God wants relationship with everyone. Wow, that makes things easy, doesn’t it? If God loves everyone, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, we don’t really have to worry terribly much. We can just do what we want and live as we like and be assured of God’s love for us.

This is something that Dietrich Bonhoeffer liked to refer to as cheap grace. And it is not a truth we find in the Bible.

There are other Christians who take a different approach. They claim that God only loves the elect. God only loves people who are his followers. They suggest that there are things we have to do to earn the great, great love of Jesus, and as long as we are not doing these things, we are not only un-loved, we are unlovable.

This is something that Saint Paul actually speaks against as works-righteousness. And it also is not a truth we find in the Bible.

II. The Spiritual Laws

The fact of the matter is that the truth is somewhere in the middle. No matter how much it makes my friends from high school throw up in their mouths, God does love everyone. I think that this is a very clear truth throughout the Bible. It is the center of the most famous Bible verse there is: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. It’s not that he loved the elect. It’s that he loved the world. The Greek word there is “Kosmon” or Cosmos. This is the cosmos that God loves. It is everything. It is all that he created. God loves this creation completely from the smallest speck of dust to the greatest mountain. And he created each of you and each person in this world and loves you and them completely and unconditionally. God loves so greatly that the Hebrews in the Old Testament came up with their own word for the love of God, a special word that is not used to describe earthly love or love from one person to another… this is Hesed: God’s undescribable love for his creation. This is where the first Christians I mentioned earlier get it right. God does love everyone: even the drug addict, even the prostitute, even the murderer.

Think for a moment about the most unlovable person you know. Think about the person that you want absolutely nothing to do with because you just cannot stand them and don’t know how they could be loved. Now realize that they are loved by God.

Now, unfortunately, some take this amazing, supernatural, uncomprehensable love of God as acceptance or even universalism. God loves everyone so he doesn’t care what we do or how we live. This isn’t how God’s love works. God loves us and he wants what’s best for us. But we don’t always choose what’s best for us. In fact, we often find ourselves choosing the very thing that is worst for us. We choose sin. We live in a broken world and we ourselves are broken. Many of us here have known Christ as long as we can remember. Many of us here cannot remember a point in our lives where God wasn’t a part of them. And even so, we find ourselves to be broken, to be sinful, to be willful, to choose the things of the world over the things of God. How much more those who have never even known that there was a choice.

So, God loves us completely, but we are broken. We cannot enter into right relationship with God because of our brokenness. We have a disease that is destroying us and pulling us away from God and that disease is sin. But do not fear because God found a cure for that disease. The cure was his Son. Jesus came to the world in order to cure us, in order to make us right. Jesus spent his life teaching and preaching and healing and working signs and wonders so that we might know what the heart of God was. Jesus went to the cross to die so that we might know life. God sacrificed his Son to take upon himself the sins of the world. And then the miraculous happened. Jesus was raised from the dead. He conquered sin, he conquered death, he conquered the devil himself. He showed that he was more powerful than the disease that is killing each of us.

And if we believe, if we confess, then we have the opportunity to be healed! By believing in Jesus we are found righteous as he was righteous. By accepting him as our Lord and Savior we are saved. This is the good news of the Gospel.

III. The Word is Near

 And so we come to Romans 10. The word is near to us. The truth is so simple and yet so profound. We are called to profess with our mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead. We do this not to earn God’s love. God already loved us, back when we were only a thought in his mind. But this is how we begin that journey towards right relationship with him. This is how we start down the path towards being the people he created us to be.

You notice that I say start down the path and begin the journey. It is important to remember that accepting Christ, entering into relationship with him, is not the end that we seek, it is only the beginning. It is the beginning of an amazing relationship that God wants to have with each of us. It is the beginning of the most romantic love story you will ever know. The love story between your Creator and you.

Paul also tells us that there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all. This is old language that blurs the powerful new truth that Paul is sharing. We think that perhaps it means race doesn’t matter. But it actually means something much more profound. You see, back in Paul’s day, the Jews were the good, religious people who kept all the laws and followed all the rules. The Gentiles were those who had not grown up knowing God, who came to Christ and had to figure out which of the laws, which of the rules applied to them. Paul and the early disciples made it clear that it was up to them, the Gentiles, to figure that out for themselves.

Paul is telling us that we need to be careful as the religious folk. We need to remember that just because we grew up following the rules, just because we have been good Christian boys and girls, we cannot lord it over those around us. If God has called others into relationship with him, we need to be willing to meet them where they are and come alongside them as they begin the greatest journey they will ever know. We don’t necessarily have to hold them to the standards we hold ourselves to. We don’t need to judge them and critique them. We can rely on the Holy Spirit to start working on their hearts and their lives and moving them in the right direction. For there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles. The Lord is the Lord of all. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved! Amen.