Sermon Transcript
Romans 15, verses 5 to 7. May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had, so that with one mind and one voice you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Accept one another then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.
If you haven’t been here the last several weeks, as a church we’ve been studying how to deepen our relationships with one another, which, let’s face it, given the last year and a half, seems especially relevant right now because it’s been tough. Right? We have been limited in how much we can interact with others. Some of our relationships have been strained if we have different views of things. So, it has been tough, and it is okay to say that it has been tough.
It has been relationally difficult over the last 18 months. But even pre-pandemic and pre-2020, I had this question regarding how individuals connect together and become community with one another. You could say it like this, all groups have people, a church has people, a family has people, your company, your team, your division, they all have people, right? Every group has people, but not every group has a sense of community with each other. Why?
Why is that? Why is it that in some families when the kids grow up and the kids can choose who they vacation with and who they can hang out with on a Tuesday night, why do some grown-up kids choose to hang out with their parents and their siblings and other grown-up kids only make the occasional mandatory phone call and complain about being together on Thanksgiving? Why is that? Why is it that some families are best friends and others aren’t? In a company, why do some people feel connected to their coworkers and others feel isolated?
Why do on some sports teams, the people on the sports teams, why do they talk about it being a brotherhood and on other sports teams everybody is just out for themselves, right? Every group has people, Not every group has community, and the same thing happens at church. For some people, church people are their people. They have a sense of belonging at church. They’d say, I can’t imagine my life without these people.
For other people, church people are not their people, right? The church might be fine, You know, you might know some people’s names there, you might know a couple of facts about other people, you might even sit in a class or even serve with them sometimes, but that’s about as far as it goes. You’re not going to talk about anything personal with them because you have other people for that. The church people are okay as far as it goes, but they just aren’t your inner circle. You’re kind of doing life adjacent to church people, not really doing life with them.
So what makes the difference? How do you switch from life adjacent to life with? How do you switch from a group of people to a community? That’s what we’ve been studying and that’s what we will study for the next couple of weeks as October closes. Now Scripture gives us a whole bunch of instructions on how to do life with each other, how to get a group of people to be a community of people.
Those instructions, you may remember from last week, are called the one another commands. Last week we talked about greeting one another, showing appreciation for one another, being attentive and empathetic to one another. This week might be the most difficult one another for some of us. Because it requires something that many of us are tentative to give. So before we talk about the difficult part of this one another, let’s talk about the benefit.
I want to sell you on it first, okay? Let’s talk about the reward before we talk about the cost of the reward. Romans 15:7, accept one another then, just as Christ has accepted you. The reward is acceptance from each other to the same incredible degree that Christ accepts us. Now, some of us here today don’t really believe that Christ can accept us because of what we’ve done or where we’ve been or what’s going on in our lives.
So first, we need to address how completely Christ accepts us before it’ll sound like good news that other people in the church will accept us like Christ accepts us. So, how does Christ accept us? Answer: unconditionally, unequivocally, unreservedly, always for us, without hesitation. That’s how Christ accepts us. Paul wrote, accept one another as Christ has accepted you, in chapter 15 of his letter to the church in Rome.
Rome. Chapter 15, so he is assuming when you read chapter 15 you are already familiar with the first 14 chapters of his letter to the church in Rome, which is obviously too much for us to unpack this morning, but just a snapshot of the big picture of how completely Christ accepts us. Romans 8:1, there is now therefore no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus. How does Christ accept us? With zero amount of condemnation.
You might be like, really? Zero condemnation? Yeah, zero. Well, what if I have screwed up really badly? Isn’t God waiting to like hit me with a stick as soon as I step out of line?
And I would say, I am terribly sorry for whoever gave you that picture of God. It is not correct. For believers in Christ, for believers in Christ, for those of us who have put our trust in Jesus to free us from condemnation and judgment, the correct picture is God coming to rescue us whenever we step out of line, not coming to hit us with a stick, coming to rescue us. Right before Paul wrote, there is now therefore no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, Paul tells us about his own sin. In fact, he says he can’t stop sinning.
He says, what a wretched man that I am! And then he asks, who will rescue me from this body of death? Romans 7:24. And he answers his own question. He says, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ.
He’s like, when I am a mess, Jesus comes to rescue me. He doesn’t come to hit me with a stick. He comes to bring me closer to Him. He doesn’t push me away. That’s why Paul says, there is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Paul continues, Romans 8:38, neither death nor life, angels nor demons, nor the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. So what does acceptance in Christ look like? It’s an acceptance that nothing is ever going to get in the way of it. It’s unconditional, it’s unequivocal, it’s unreserved, it’s always for us, it’s without hesitation. It’s an acceptance where everything is known and yet Jesus comes toward us anyway.
Everything is known and yet He still loves us the same.
And this is where we start getting nervous because we don’t really want everything about ourselves to be known. We have a fear of being exposed. We think if people really knew everything about me, they’d reject me. And we don’t want to be rejected, remember, because rejection hurts. We talked about that the first week of this series.
So we conceal certain aspects of our lives in order to avoid rejection. But Jesus sees everything and still accepts us. That’s what his acceptance is like. As Tim Keller says, Jesus sees us to the bottom yet loves us to the sky. Jesus is not surprised by anything that happens in our lives.
He knows exactly where we have been, what we have done, and what we will mess up with in the future, and he still comes toward us. Or as Matt Chandler often says, Jesus knew what he was buying when he bought you. He doesn’t have buyer’s remorse. He knew everything about you, and he still wanted you. He accepts the real you, not the version of you that you present to the public, because that’s not the real you, is it?
We— well, what we often do is conceal the parts of us that we perceive others won’t really like, and we only let other people see the aspects of ourselves that we think they will accept. But that’s kind of a farce, right? Because that version of us doesn’t really exist. It’s like a Photoshopped version of us. So if they end up liking the Photoshopped version, I mean, great, but it also leaves us a little hollow because instead of accepting the real us, they’re only accepting that edited version of us.
If we want them to accept us like Christ accepts us, then they would need to know us like Christ knows us. Remember, Christ accepts us in a way that sees us to the bottom and yet loves us to the sky. So, if anyone else is going to accept us like Christ does, they will need to see us to the bottom. You get that idea there from verse 5 in Romans 15, it says, have the same attitude of mind toward each other that Christ Jesus had. What is Christ’s attitude of mind towards us?
What is in His mind about us, right? His attitude is He receives all of us, and in His mind nothing is hidden. Then verse 6 says that we speak the same things to each other about each other that Christ Christ speaks to us so that we together with Him will have one voice, right? So, what is it that Christ speaks to us? He says that there is no condemnation for you.
He says there’s nothing that will separate you from My love. It’s, I know everything about you. I’m still coming towards you. Then in verse 7, it says, accept one another as Christ has accepted you. So, the idea of these 3 verses is we’re fully known, we’re fully accepted, and we articulate that acceptance back and forth to each other through our speech, which reinforces to ourselves what Christ is saying to us, like the horizontal matches the vertical, so we’re all on the same page.
And that sounds great except for the being fully known part, hence why I said this might be the most difficult of the one anothers. The biggest challenge with accept one another isn’t us accepting someone else’s faults, although that can sometimes be pretty difficult, right? That’s not the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is letting other people see our faults so they can accept us. The biggest challenge is being vulnerable and transparent, letting someone else see us to the bottom.
But again, if they don’t see us completely, and then accept us, then they are not accepting us like Christ accepts us. So, for today, we are going to talk about 3 aspects of our lives that we must reveal in order to give others the opportunity to accept us like Christ accepts us. There are probably more aspects of our lives that we need to reveal, probably, but we are just going to cover 3 big ones today. That will be enough. So, here they are.
Suffering, shortcomings, and sin. Sufferings, shortcomings, and sin. So, the first aspect of our lives that we need to reveal in order for people to accept us like Christ accepts us is suffering. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12, I will boast about my weaknesses. He actually says he will gladly boast about his weaknesses.
So that Christ’s power may rest on me. He says, that is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses and insults and hardships and persecutions and difficulties, for when I am weak, then I am strong. In other words, Paul doesn’t hide the suffering he is in, he shouts it from the rooftops. He boasts. He is like, hey, look at me, I am having a hard time over here.
When we are going through a hard time, Do we tend to tell others about it or do we keep it to ourselves? Do we say, ah, I can handle it. I don’t want to bother other people with what’s going on with me. They would get tired of me talking about this all the time. They don’t need to know.
I mean, when you’re sick, do you let people bring you soup or are you like, ah, I can handle it.
When you have a huge unforeseen expense, Do you try to manage it on your own or do you say, I really need some help with this? Is it easy to ask for help or is it hard to ask for help?
Doesn’t seem like we’d be boasting in our weaknesses and difficulties if it’s hard for us to ask for help, right? Paul says in Galatians 6 that we are required to carry one another’s burdens and in this way fulfill the law of Christ. But how are we supposed to carry one another’s burdens if we don’t know about one another’s burdens? Parents with young kids, are you going crazy?
Do you need a night out? If so, do you tell people you are really struggling or do you just try to handle it yourself? Right, we can’t help you carry your burden if we don’t know about your burden. Now once we know about it, the group has a responsibility to carry it with you, but they can never do that unless you say your need. We have, we have a link on our website which is bridges.church, bridges.church.
I love that we have that domain. Good job to our team who bought that the first day it was on the market. Bridges.church, if you go there front and center on the front page, it says, I need help. If you click the I need help button, it’s like sending a flare up into the air, and you can submit a message to say what your need is. We actually have a deacon in charge of getting people help if they need it.
But I’ll tell you, we put this button up on our website over a year ago, and we’ve had a few requests for help, but not a bunch. I mean, some, not a lot, which either means— I think that means 2 things, 2 choices. As a group, number one, as a group, we don’t have very many burdens. That’s one thing it could mean. Or the other thing it could mean is we don’t do a very good job telling others about our burdens.
I have a feeling we have some burdens. We probably just try to handle them on our own, right? We try to be self-sufficient, and the more we do that, the less others can accept us as Christ accepts us, the less they could carry our burdens. Okay, okay, so we need to reveal our suffering to others. That’s actually the easiest type of transparency that we’ll talk about today.
We’re just going to keep increasing in difficulty. Second aspect of our lives that we need to reveal to others in order for them to have the opportunity to accept us as Christ accepts us. Shortcomings, we need to tell them about our shortcomings. Shortcomings are possibly included when Paul is saying, boast in his weaknesses, that shortcomings could be a type of boasting in weaknesses. Paul could have been talking about inadequacies he had when he said he had weaknesses, that’s even likely.
But even more explicit, it, then 2 Corinthians 12 is 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 where Paul is talking about how God uses weak people. God uses those without influence. God uses the foolish and the lowly people in the world to accomplish His purposes. And then referring to himself, Paul says, 1 Corinthians 2 starting in verse 1, Paul says, when I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom. Like, if you read his resume, it would say, bad speaker.
He says, I came to you in weakness, with fear, and much trembling. How do you feel about your ministry, Paul? I’m terrified of it, and I’m not a good speaker. He says, my message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power. So, instead of covering up his shortcomings, he highlights them, like puts them in bold, gets the yellow highlighter and colors all over it.
He gives like an anti-résumé. He is talking himself down instead of talking himself up, right? And that is boasting in your weaknesses. Just wondering, when we are talking about our performance, do we try to touch up our blemishes? Do we try to make ourselves look more competent than we really are, or are we like, look at my blemishes, Let me circle back around to how much I messed up because I’m not sure you got the full picture the first time when we talked about my failures.
So let’s just go through them again. If we lose our job, if we get a poor performance review, do we tell people about it or do we try to spin it to make it sound like somebody else’s fault? Or, oh, you know, I’m actually happy about the opportunity to get to try something new finally. I got out of that situation. Listen, you don’t need to spin it.
The group is supposed to accept you like Christ accepts you. He knows how bad you messed up. He knows you were in way over your head and you shouldn’t have taken on that extra responsibility. He knows that you fell flat on your face, put your foot in your mouth, looked ridiculous. He knows about that.
He knows people literally laughed at you and called you a fool. He knows all that, and He still accepts you.
The group can’t accept us like that unless they know us like that, unless they know about those shortcomings.
Side note to our biblical scholars who want to stand up and say Paul wasn’t boasting about his weakness in order to be accepted, I agree. Paul was boasting about his weakness in order to make much of Christ, absolutely. He’s becoming lesser so that Christ can become more, A+. I’m so glad that you brought that up. Let’s just imagine that you didn’t try to cover up your shortcomings but instead you regularly and confidently talked about your shortcomings, like somebody points out something you did wrong and instead of being defensive you’re like, brother, you don’t know the half of it, I am far more of a failure than you will ever realize.
What if you handled yourself like that in the world? Do you think it would stick out to other people? Do you think they would notice? Of course they would. And then they would probably ask, they would be like, why are you like that?
Why do you lean into it when somebody calls you a fool? Why do you receive it so well? Right? And you can say, because I know that Christ accepts me, and bonus, my church accepts me like Christ accepts me, so when I mess up, which happens, I don’t feel inadequate because I don’t get my sense of approval or my sense of security from my performance. That’s not where it comes from.
My sense of approval, my sense of security comes from Christ’s acceptance of me, and as an extra, my church’s acceptance of me. If you say that, just guessing, other people will probably be like, where is it that you go to church? Okay, 3rd aspect of ourselves that we must reveal in order for the church to accept us, like Christ accepts us.
Sin. Sin. We must reveal our sin. James, brother of Jesus, of course, writes, confess your sins to one another that you may be healed, James 5:16. Confess your sins to one another.
And we’re like, Can’t I just confess my sins to God without bringing anybody else into it? And certainly, we need to admit our moral failures to God, of course, like that’s part of repentance that’s required, yes. But James emphasizes an additional angle to confession. He says, confess your sins to one another. And Paul actually lives this out.
He confesses his sins. To others. We already talked about Romans 7 where Paul writes that he can’t stop sinning. But you got to realize that Paul wrote that in a letter to a whole church. It’s not like Romans 7 was Paul’s private prayer journal that we only discovered after Paul died, right?
And then we dig it up and we’re like, oh, I guess Paul was a big mess. Who knew? It’s not what happened. He revealed it to the whole church in Rome. It’s like he posted it on his Twitter, right?
As public as he could say it, he said it. He’s like, guys, I’m kind of flailing around in my sin here. I can’t stop. What a wretched man I am! Who will save me from this?
Can you imagine somebody putting that on their social media today? What about like a church leader like Paul? Paul did it.
Listen, I know it’s intimidating to be transparent about our sin, but unless other people really see you to the bottom, they will never have the opportunity to accept you like Christ accepts you. And there is something healing, something needed, something that our souls long for about being seen to the bottom and yet loved to the sky.
To be truly known and received by another gives us so much confidence and security and joy. It’s one of our deepest hopes.
If we share that level of transparency with others, it really binds us to them. If, on the other hand, what we tend to do, if we put up walls, if we don’t let others in, we will not feel connected to them. I mean, think about it. If you don’t let others in, how could you feel connected to them, right? Like, if you’re keeping them out, if you put up a wall, then you will feel isolated kind of by definition, right?
Why do we put up walls? In order to be separated from others. That’s, you know, the guy who invented the wall. That’s why he did it. But if we do that, like, then we will feel separated.
Of course, we will feel alone because we’ve isolated ourselves. This is the crisis for many of us, right? We cannot stand feeling lonely, but at the same time, we’re terrified to let anyone else truly know us. But the fact is, it’s one or the other. If we don’t let people in, we will be lonely.
So if you don’t feel connected to this church, for example, which we did our survey, and if you haven’t been here the last few weeks, that’s about a third of you don’t feel connected to this church. If you don’t feel connected to this church, part of that failure is on the church for sure. We’ve been talking about that. Did we greet you? Did we welcome you?
Did we encourage you? Did we include you? Did we remember you? Right? Part of your loneliness is because the church has failed and we need to work on that and I’m sorry and that’s why we’re doing this series.
But it’s possible part of your loneliness is because of you because if you didn’t let others in it doesn’t matter how much the others encourage you and appreciate you and affirm you, you will still feel like you don’t belong because it’s self-isolation. You haven’t let anyone else know you. You’ve got to put yourself out there. You have to. Once you put yourself out there, the rest of the group is required to receive you, not reject you.
And unfortunately, maybe some of you have had a rejection experience here. You put yourself out there, you got burned, and you’re like, I’m not doing that again. Oh, it’s safer to be lonely. At least I won’t be rejected. If I’m never known, I can’t be rejected.
And you’re right, it is safer. We had a sermon question come in a couple of weeks ago. This came in anonymously, no idea who sent it in, but it breaks my heart. The person asked, should someone continue seeking community if all they experience is rejection? A person asked, even though living without community leads to lower life expectancy, being ostracized from community must be worse.
So the person was like, yeah, loneliness is bad, but it’s not as bad as rejection, so how many times should I put myself out there? That was the question, right? Like, give me a number.
Doesn’t it grieve you to hear someone who’s had that experience at Bridges?
It does me. It bothers me a lot.
But to answer the question, in case some of the rest of you have the same strategy, isn’t it better to close yourself off so that you won’t be rejected? Isn’t that better? The answer is no, it is not better. C.S. Lewis said it like this, if you want to make sure of keeping your heart intact, in other words, if you want to make sure your heart never gets broken, if you want to guarantee you will never get rejected, this is what C.S.
Lewis says, quote, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it round carefully with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe, lock your heart up safe, in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change.
It will not be broken. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
End quote. He says if you close yourself off from others to protect yourself, then you will die in that tomb. But if you want to experience the thrill of someone accepting you like Christ accepts you, then you have to let others know you like Christ knows you. He knows about your past. He knows about your suffering.
He knows about your shortcomings. He knows about your sin. Of course, He knows about your sin. He paid for it, right? On the cross, He bore the weight of your sins so that you would be free from it.
He sees all your warts and failures and He says, I’m running toward you. He accepts you. If you want someone else to accept you like He accepts you, then you need to let them in. They need to truly know you, your sufferings, your shortcomings, and your sin.
Let’s pray. Father, thank you for how we are accepted in Christ. It is frankly mind-boggling, Lord, and we doubt, we have serious doubts that anybody could accept us like you accept us, Lord, that if anybody truly saw us to the bottom that they would still want to have anything to do with us, Lord. We doubt that. I pray that you would give us the confidence to speak confess, reveal who we truly are.
And I pray as a church we embrace one another, we welcome one another, that we accept one another as you accept us. We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
