Reminders

Would you join with me now in prayer before we look into the Word of God and then come to this table to celebrate what Jesus has done for us. Let's pray. Lord God we are thankful that we can gather together today to worship in your presence freely and with joy not with dread we thank you that because of Jesus we can call you Father and that you love us and that you enjoy us and our praises to you would you now teach us and speak to us we pray through your word by your spirit so that we can come to this table rejoicing in what Jesus accomplish for us.

Thank you in Jesus' name. Amen. One Saturday I was in my office and studying away because Sunday was coming and that's always a you know a dreadful thing for me. I have to get my work done. So Saturday I was in my office studying and the phone rang and it was my daughter Annie. Annie was asking about something that was going to be happening in the next week.

I said, I'm not sure. So I opened up my day timer to look and lo and behold, I saw written right in front of me that that day I had a wedding. I'd forgotten completely about it. I'd forgotten absolutely about that wedding that Saturday afternoon. And if she hadn't called, I would not have seen that in my day timer and I'd have been in big trouble. I forgot that I had a wedding that afternoon.

When Beck and I were younger and living in Indiana soon after we got married. There was a family in our church that had five children. And one night they went to the pizza hut and they all piled in the van and headed home. And about halfway home they realized that they had left their little daughter at the pizza hut. Have you ever forgotten an anniversary or a birthday or a wedding or maybe even a person?

Yeah we very forgetful aren we We very forgetful about things that we need to remember I pretty confident that many of you have at one time or another forgotten an important date, an appointment, a commitment. You've forgotten a variety of things. We have a tendency to forget. So what do you do in order to remember? Well, you write on your hand, or you leave post-it notes around, or you write it on the calendar or you take out your or you take out your cell phone and you pull up the calendar and start punching in these things so that at a particular time it's going to ring and tell you got something going on that day in a few hours but we all have ways of reminding ourselves of these things we need reminders now god also gives us reminders so that we do not forget some important things.

One of those reminders is before you today, the Lord's table. Now these are more than reminders. This table brings us into communion with Jesus in a very special way. And it's also a means by which God ministers to us sanctifying grace so that we will live for him. But that begins that ministry to us at the level of reminding us of the magnificent and truths of the Gospel.

I want you to look at a text today about the necessity of bold reminders to us about the Gospel. It's found in Romans 15. So if you will, turn to Romans 15 and we'll be reading verses 14-16. Paul writes, I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another. But on some points, I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder, because of the grace given me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

The Apostle Paul talks about reminders here, and I want to remind you of some things this morning. first of all be reminded of the gospel after telling us that we're competent to instruct or to counsel one another Paul says that he has written quite boldly about some of the gospel in order to remind them You see we need reminders of the Gospel We need them The Apostle, when you come to the end of this book, you find out that the Apostle Paul wrote this book to the Church of Rome to explain to them the Gospel that he was preaching. You see, he had never met those people. And this is a missionary letter.

You know, every week, almost without fail, a letter goes across my desk from a missionary looking for support. That's what this is. It was the Apostle Paul writing the church at Rome, people he'd never met. He'd not founded that church. Someone else had. And he was writing them so that they would support him as he was headed off towards Spain to take the gospel to regions that had never heard of Jesus.

And this book was his explanation of what he preached. A summation of the Gospel. And in that explanation, he got rather bold at some points to remind them of some truths of the Gospel. Why? You know, depending on your week, depending on what has happened to you, depending on your dealings, you need to remember certain points of the Gospel. You need reminders of the Gospel in order to understand its meaning for you in your situation?

For example, what about work? What about work? Is that a place you dread? Or is that the place where you exhibit that Jesus is your Lord? Do you see your co-workers as filthy idiots? Or people who are lost and in desperate need of grace and forgiveness, alienated from God, headed for an eternity of torment.

You need reminders about the Gospel in your marriage. Is your marriage a relationship that exists to make you happy? Or where you have the opportunity to display in very great ways the love of Jesus. Do you see it as a place where you display the relationship of Christ to His church? Do you see it as the means to become more like Jesus Do you know that marriage is a mutually sanctifying gift that God has given us You know for example I thought I was a pretty cool guy until I got married I found out I wasn't as cool as I thought I was.

I thought I was a pretty patient guy until I got married. All right? Marriage is the gospel at work. What about parenting, right? Do you see parenting as the one place where you can be the boss? Or do you see it as the greatest place of servanthood?

Has someone mistreated you? Well, is that an opportunity for revenge or an occasion to show real love, kindness, and goodness? You see, the Gospel gives a different view of everything. And we need to be reminded of the Gospel because we live in a graceless, merciless world that will push us into its mold unless we are reminded of the Gospel over and over and over again.

Every Sunday as we come to church, we are reminded of the Gospel. We do it through our singing as we lift our voices in praise to a holy and just God who stoops to save unjust, wicked, corrupt people. Our offering, by the way, our offering is an act of worship, not a time for us to catch up on this afternoon's plans with our neighbor. Our offering is an opportunity to thank God for his gift to us that is indescribable.

In our confession of sin and assurance of pardon, we're reminded that we all sin in particular specific ways and that God still forgives us because of what He's done in Jesus. The Scripture reading brings to our minds the whole story of God's redemptive purpose. The sermon is God speaking to you of how Christ must work in you. You see, we need reminders of the Gospel. and today we have the Lord's table we recall the Jesus death and resurrection on our behalf and God reminds us that we have died to the old realm of sin and been raised to a new way of life in Jesus, dead to sin and alive to God.

We need bold reminders of the gospel all the time, don't we? We need bold reminders of the gospel all the time. Now, why has the Apostle Paul gone through the trouble of giving such bold reminders in this book? Well, for reasons of authority. be reminded of the gospel's authority be reminded of the gospel's authority paul was bold and reminding them because of the authority that he had in the church he said but on some points i've written to you very boldly by way of reminder because of the grace given me by god he acted out of obedience to the commission he had been given by the lord jesus himself now one thing that we have to understand is the apostles carried on the work of Jesus and they spoke the words that Jesus would have spoken if he had stayed.

Jesus in John chapter 14 and in John chapter 16 says, I'm going to lead you into all truth. Now that's not meant for us. That was meant for those apostles. It says, I will call to remembrance and you will speak the things that I want you to speak. What was he saying there? He was saying there that he had commissioned them to speak the things that he would speak if he'd remain.

And so what we have in the rest of Scripture, if you want to call it the apostolic word, is the very communication of Jesus to us because Jesus commissioned them to do that. But as an apostle, he had the authority from Jesus the King to proclaim the Gospel. Suppose you came across a platoon of soldiers down here on the corner of 95 and High Street, okay?

If you walked up to those platoon of soldiers just and said, attention. Said, we're going to go on a two-mile hike. Do you think they'd listen to you? They wouldn't pay attention to you. But if a lieutenant walked up and said the same thing, they would snap to attention and they would take off on that hike. Why?

He has some bars on his shoulders that says, I've been commissioned by higher authority to command men. And they know that and they listen Same thing with the Apostle Paul He has the right to remind you of the Gospel today because of his authority But you know there something else that you need to see here and that is this. The Gospel itself has authority.

Do you see how he says it? He says in verse 16 that he's a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God. Paul not only has authority to proclaim the gospel because he's an apostle, but because he's under the gospel. The gospel carries with it authority. Look over Galatians for a moment. The apostle Paul knows that he himself is under the authority of the gospel because if he dares to proclaim another gospel, look what happens.

Galatians 1, verses 8 and 9. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed. As I have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you receive, let him be accursed. I think the translators are trying not to be too graphic, but he's essentially saying if you preach another gospel, let him be damned.

That's what he essentially says. Okay? That's pretty serious stuff, isn't it? The gospel has authority. So the gospel he proclaims has authority even over him. He can't preach another one.

Now what does that mean? It means the gospel has authority over you and the Gospel must rule you. The Gospel is your authority. Again, in Galatians, you remember Paul and Peter had this altercation because Peter had withdrawn from the Gentiles because he'd come under pressure from some Jewish believers that said Gentiles are unclean. You can't eat with them.

And so Peter had withdrawn. And you remember what Paul said to him in Galatians 2? I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel. The gospel now has authority over you. In our Titus school I teaching the class right now called Christ Ethics and the work that I been given the guys to do and all the reading they had to do is this whole idea of what is our authority?

What is our authority? Our authority is not the law that was given in the Old Covenant. That's not our authority. What is our authority? The Gospel. The Gospel is our authority.

It is the gospel that tells us how we ought to live and how we ought to act. It is the gospel that gives us an entirely different frame of reference by which to understand the world. That is why when you're reminded of the gospel, you must, you're required to think of marriage and parenting and work and everything else in your life in a different way.

It's because the gospel gives you a different framework for understanding the world. And the Gospel commands you to act and to think and to be in certain ways. It is the Gospel that's your authority. If you want to know what to do as a Christian, read the Gospels. Jesus wasn't kidding around when He said, when somebody misuses you, what do you do? you pray for them you do good to them you go the extra mile with them you go out of your way for your enemy right he wasn't kidding around when he said those things and what we tend to do is to say well he what he really means is because it seems so hard right no the gospel has authority over you.

It is your authority. It is your word from God as to how you ought to think and be and behave. So the Lord's table reminds you that you live under a different authority. The world has its own authority. Your authority is the gospel. So be reminded of the gospel's authority.

The last thing he says here is be reminded of the gospel's fruit. when the gospel is proclaimed and believed it produces a people who are exclusively devoted to God verse 16 the grace is given to me by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit. In the picture that Paul draws here, proclaiming the gospel is like doing the ministry of a priest. Okay?

Now what did the priest do in the Old Testament? He would greet the worshipers as they brought their offering to God. Or as in the Day of Atonement, he would call them. They would be called to the sacrifice. And when you would come with your offering, he would make sure that the offering met the requirements of sacrifice so that it would be acceptable to God.

If you brought in a defective lamb or you brought in some kind of a defective sacrifice, the priest would say you can't offer this, this is not acceptable to God. But if you brought it, he would examine it, it would be acceptable to God, and then on behalf of you, he would offer up that sacrifice to God. So proclaiming the gospel is like preparing and then presenting an offering that's pleasing to God.

But that offering must be pure. It must be sanctified in order to be acceptable to God. It must meet certain requirements. Now, what is the offering here? Look at verse 16 again. The offering of the Gentiles.

It doesn't mean the offering that the Gentiles bring. That's not what he means. He's meaning the offering of the Gentiles to God. That's what he means. I have this priestly service of taking Gentiles and offering them to God. Alright?

Now, why is that such a big deal? Because the Gentiles were outside the covenant community of God. They were not fit. They're not fit sacrifices. How can they possibly become acceptable to God? They're unclean and unfit to serve God.

What happens? He proclaims the Gospel to them. And they believe. And when they believe, the Holy Spirit sets them apart of humanity, and now they become acceptable to God, not because of what they have done, but because the Gospel then is the instrument by which the Holy Spirit connects them to the cleansing power of the cross of Jesus so that now they are acceptable to God.

That means you. That's you. Born into this world, you are unacceptable to God. All of humanity is unacceptable to God. unfit, corrupt, an offering that should never be offered to God. But then the Gospel comes. It is proclaimed.

You believe. And in your believing, in your trusting, in your faith, the Holy Spirit sets you apart from the rest of humanity as a people exclusively devoted to God. You are different than any other organization in the world. As the church, there is no other group that can make that claim but the church of Jesus Christ. You have been set apart by the Holy Spirit as a fit offering to God.

One theologian has said this, when the Spirit brings people to faith through the preaching of the Gospel, they are set apart from their unbelieving contemporaries and are bound together with other believers in an exclusive relationship with God And so God reminds you that the Spirit, through the Gospel, sets apart you to God. It actually produces fruit. It actually produces something. it produces a people for God.

As you participate in the Lord's table God reminds you that the cleansing of the cross becomes yours as the Spirit through the Gospel applies its cleansing power to you. God reminds you that the Spirit working through the Gospel sets apart sinners as the exclusive possession of God and for the exclusive service of God. So you see, we need bold reminders of the Gospel.

In our hurried chaotic busy lives we forget We forget what the gospel tells us We forget how the gospel ought to change everything in our perspective How the gospel ought to change everything in our actions. We forget, as we work and play and just live, we have a tendency to forget all that God has accomplished for us by His Son through His Spirit. So we have this reminder for us today.

So now we come to this table in order to have fellowship with Jesus. and we have a bold reminder of what He has done for us in the Gospel. Let's pray. God our Father, as we come to this table, remind us again of all that you have accomplished in Jesus Remind us of the gospel authority That in the gospel, Jesus speaks His commandments to us. And that that gospel has authority over everything that we are, everything that we think, everything that we do. remind us of the fruit that has been produced by the gospel a people exclusively devoted to God remind us of these things Father because in this world we are too easily forced into the mold of the world's thinking of the world's authority of the world's fruit fathers we come to this table remind us again of what Jesus has done do that we pray for your glory and our good amen