What We Are Being About While We Are Being About It

Romans 16:17-20
Pastor Randy Nabors
October 4, 2026

Tonight, we’re going to come from the book of Romans. And this is a tremendous book. We’re going to talk basically about the last two chapters, 15 and 16. But we’re going to start by reading one particular passage from chapter 16, verses 17 through 20:

17 I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who cause divisions and put obstacles in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned. Keep away from them. 18 For such people are not serving our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. By smooth talk and flattery they deceive the minds of naïve people. 19 Everyone has heard about your obedience, so I rejoice because of you; but I want you to be wise about what is good, and innocent about what is evil. 20 The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Let’s pray. Holy Father, thank you for allowing us the joy of being able to worship. And to worship together without a fear of the government or fear of the culture or oppression, that we have the freedom to gather here in Jesus’ name. We pray that you, Holy Spirit, will come and bless our time in the study of your Word. Lord, you have an agenda for each person. You know our needs. You know where we are. Please speak to our hearts. Lord, we pray against war in the world. There’s so many countries at war. Please bring peace and deliver the people. Father, we’re asking for these blessings, thanking you for your amazing love. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Now, for a lot of Protestant Reformed Christians, the book of Romans is really special. They just love it and they buy a lot of books to explain it. Romans is one of the greatest books ever written, in my opinion. And here at the end of the book, Paul sees the work of redemption: how Jesus died for sinners, how Jesus died for you. The work of redemption is brought all the way back to the Garden of Eden. Did you catch that in the verses we just read in chapter 16? It talks about being innocent of evil and wise about what is good. That’s a reference to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And then he says, “Soon you will crush Satan”—that comes from Genesis 3, where the Lord promised Adam and Eve, “You’ve sinned, but I’m going to send somebody to redeem you, to crush the devil, to crush the evil one. I’m going to send a redeemer.” That person is Jesus Christ. So we are bought back from that terrible day. All of the evil in the world comes from that particular day. Death came because of that day. War came because of that day. Racial hatred and the ethnic conflict around the world has come about because the human race sinned against God. Because of sin, death came upon us all.

And Paul teaches us that there are really two important words in the book of Romans that he wants us to understand. One is obedience and the other is righteousness, for both Jews and Gentiles. How can we ever be obedient enough? How can we ever be righteous enough to go to heaven? Well, there’s only one way: By faith in the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ. Brothers and sisters, do you realize amazing that is? Because in a lot of our cultures, they don’t teach that. A lot of our cultures say, “No. If you want to be obedient, you have to try harder. If you want to be righteous, you have to keep the Ten Commandments. If you want to be good, you have to try really hard to be good.” Now, how good do you think you have to be to go to heaven? You have to be perfect. Has anybody achieved this yet? No! And so you know what happens? We go around feeling guilty and frustrated, especially when we make another mistake, when we sin again. It’s not like all of you have only sinned once in your life. You would be a pretty good person if you had only sinned once. But you and I, we sin a lot. We’re really good at it. We’re good at being bad. So we can’t make up for our sins. And if our whole life, we’ve been taught, “Here’s the standard. Try to reach it”, and we can’t, some of us just give up. And we say, “I might as well live an evil life. I might as well do whatever I want. I’ll never please God.” Good news. The gospel. Jesus was good for you. He was good in your place. All of his righteousness that he lived in his life has now been given to you. And all of your sin was given to him and it happened on the day you had faith in Jesus Christ. That’s redemption. You are saved by grace. You couldn’t earn it. You couldn’t do it. No matter what religion you came from, you could never achieve perfection. And what Christ has done to the world is to say, “Stop it! Stop trying in your flesh. And believe in me that I already did it for you.” And you know what happens? He makes you good. He puts his Holy Spirit in you to be an engine of righteousness.

Now, in Romans, something begins to be told to them through Paul. Paul tells them, “I want to tell you a mystery. I want to explain a mystery to you that is now being revealed: that God did not only want to save and redeem the Jews, the Jewish people, but he’s also calling the Gentiles to himself, through the son of David, the Jewish Messiah. Jesus now is the Savior of the world.” This is God’s work of reconciliation. And by the way, in these last two chapters of Romans comes the very title of your church. Look with me at chapter 15:

5 May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, 6 that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. 7 Therefore welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.

This is the mystery that was kept hidden during the Old Testament. Now, it’s not total secret because we’re gonna find out right here in chapter 15, Paul quotes all these verses from the Old Testament that told everybody that the Gentiles are going to be saved. But yet, the Jewish people, they didn’t want to hear that. During the time that Jesus came, the Jews had become very ethnocentric. They were all wrapped up around themselves, but the Jewish people had a hard time. They were created through Abraham when God told him, “You’re going to have a lot of children. You’re going to have a lot of descendants and from one of your descendants, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.” And so, God created the Jewish people and he gave them the law. He gave them promises and he promised the fathers, “I’m going to send a messiah. I’m going to send a savior. He’s going to come into the world and he’s gonna be Jewish.” And so the Jewish people struggled because sometimes they said, “We’re tired of waiting! We’d rather worship a golden cow.” And they made a golden cow. And then, they heard about other countries that they were surrounded by and they said, “Well, they’ve got gods! They’ve got statues! Let’s try their gods.” And their gods were horrible. Some of their gods actually said to them, “If you really want to worship this god, you have to take your first child and burn him in the fire.” God said, “I never asked you to do that.” But finally, they got rid of their idols. They were taken to captivity into Babylon. And when they came back, they didn’t have a problem with idols anymore. Their idol became them. They were all wrapped around their own culture, all wrapped around their own nation. And then, Jesus shows up. And Jesus said, “I have sheep that are not of this sheep fold. I have other people that are gonna come to me.” They didn’t like that. The book of John says, “He came into the world. And the world was made by him. But the world knew him not. He came to his own (the Jewish people) but his own received him not. But to as many as received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become the children of God.” I hope you’re one of them.

Paul is trying to tell them in Romans that God has this mystery that’s been revealed and he gives a whole list of verses in chapter 15 from the book of Psalms that the Gentiles are going to come in. Anybody who is not Jewish is a Gentile. It doesn’t matter what continent you come from, if you’re Asian, if you’re from Africa, if you’re from South America, North America, Europe. If you’re not Jewish, you are outside of covenant of God. But when Jesus came, he said, “Now, I’m going to open the doors.” And so Jesus came—it tells us in chapter 15—to keep the promise God made to the Jewish people. He was born a Jew, he came to the Jewish people, and he died on the cross for them. But they rejected him. But then God called Saul. And to me, this is like a joke, it’s one of the big jokes of the Bible. Here’s a Jewish man named Saul who hates Jesus, he hates Gentiles, and he even kills one of the first Christians. He’s a blasphemer, but he thinks he’s doing God’s work while he does it. And then what happens? On the road to Damascus to arrest Christians, Jesus appears to him and all of a sudden he says, “Who are you?” And he said, “I am Jesus. You’re trying to persecute me. But I want you to now go into Damascus and I’m going to show you how much you have to suffer from my sake.” And so God calls Saul—later we know him as Paul—to become the missionary to who? The Gentiles! Can you imagine all his life, Paul was saying, “How did I get this job? I grew up not even being able to go into their house. I wouldn’t go into a Gentile’s house. I wouldn’t eat with a Gentile.” If you’re a Gentile here tonight, you owe your salvation partly to the calling of Saul to be a missionary to us. Now, we get to be part of the family. All the promises that were for the Jewish people are now ours. We have become part of the same tree. We were a wild tree and we got grafted onto the natural tree. We’re part of the kingdom of God. So that’s the mystery.

The title of the sermon I never gave you, it’s a little complicated, but I’ll give it to you anyway. It’s “What We Are Being About While We Are Being About It”. So what’s the “it” that we’re being about? Well, it’s this gospel of reconciliation. The reconciling gospel that brings Jews and Gentiles to the obedience of faith. The way we get to obedience is through faith. We don’t get to salvation through our obedience. It’s counterintuitive. But that’s what grace is. No one ever figured that out. God gave it to us. You can’t do it. God said, “I’ll do it for you. I will bring you to myself. I will deliver you from your sins. I will forgive you.” Hallelujah. So the reconciling gospel that brings Jews and Gentiles. You know, I like reconciliation. My wife is African American. We grew up on the same block. We went to the same schools. She lived in the next building to me. But I would never talk to her and she would never talk to me, because she’s black and I’m white. And there was hostility between our people. You know the history of America. You know how terrible things have been for us, how many people have died hating each other. Even today, it’s still here. How could we ever be one? Jesus saved her and saved me in the same inner city church. He brought us together. We went to the same grammar school, the same high school, but it was Christ who brought us together. And people warned us, “It’ll never work! What about your children? Nobody will like you. You’ll never be able to get a job as a preacher.” And God has the last laugh. So we have 4 children, 16 grandchildren, and 3 great-grandchildren. And we have been married 55 years.

Now, it tells us in verses 8 and 9 of chapter 15 what Christ did and what Paul did. Christ came and kept the promises, and Paul went and was called to go to the Gentiles. And it’s this great reconciliation—this reconciling gospel—bringing people to the obedience of faith. Now, let me give you my second point. What is the “we” who are to be about it? We’re supposed to be about this reconciling gospel. Preaching it, teaching it, sharing it, living it. And you are part of the example of reconciliation. And there may be some people here who come from backgrounds where your people actually hate it, somebody else sitting in the other pew, hated the tribe, hated the nationality. That may be true. But Christ changes your heart. So that now you ought to be willing to lay down your life for each other. That’s a miracle of grace. So the “we” we are to be about is the church. And there’s a big “we” and a smaller “we”. You are the small “we”, the local church. But you are connected to the church all around the world, the universal church. And that’s why we’re Presbyterians. We believe in a connected church. In other words, if your church was in trouble, you ought to be able to ask the rest of the church for help. And they ought to be able to give it. And in some sense, you’ve already experienced that by the Chinese Church giving you the use of this building. Praise the Lord. Both Gentile and Jewish churches started to help each other. Paul was telling them, “There’s a famine in Judea. The Jewish people are going to be starving. The Gentile churches are going to give money to me to take to them to help them, because they are thankful that I brought them a spiritual gift so they’re giving me a material gift in return.” That’s what happens. That’s part of reconciliation. They were striving together in prayer. I hope you’re praying for other churches in this city and for other churches around the world. We watch out for each other. We try to help each other avoid evil. Do you remember the Scripture we read right at the beginning? “To avoid people who are causing trouble, putting obstacles in your way.” That’s part of what we do for each other, we warn each other. Not everybody who talks God is of God. We have to be careful.

Let me give you my third and last point. How do we go about this work of the gospel? As the battle is waged against the devil and the world and our own sins, how do we do that? Well, each local church is part of this great mission, this great vision. So we have to serve the church. And if you look in chapter 16 verse one, Paul talks about a woman named Phoebe. And he says, “She was a diakonon, a ‘servant’ of the church.” And he said, “I want you to help her because she has been a help to me and to a whole bunch of Christians. She’s this wonderful woman.” Someday in heaven, we’re all going to get to meet Phoebe. And in our denomination, we have a lot of fights going on, such as what do we do about women? Some people say, should we ordain women as deacons? And our denomination says, we don’t ordain women. We don’t ordain them as elders. We don’t ordain them as deacons. I want you to be careful. You might have a strong opinion about this. You might think, “No, Phoebe was not a deacon,” even though the Bible calls her a deacon. She certainly was a servant of the church. But we can’t do church without women. So if you have a strong opinion about what women who serve in mercy should be called, that’s fine. But unless you are showing mercy yourself, unless you are serving the church, you really need to shut up about your opinion. Because you see, the issue is not the title. The issue is doing the work. I have known some amazing women in my life, who obviously were the strength of the congregation. They served. And they didn’t really much care about what they were called but everybody showed them respect. And I hope all of you women in this church will be those kind of women, godly women. And I hope all of you men will hold them in high esteem and never think that they’re below you.

Then, Paul talks about two wonderful people: Priscilla and Aquila, a married couple. And he said, “They risked their lives for me. They took risks for the gospel.” Then, in chapter 16, he names 28 different people. To me, that’s amazing. I can’t remember people’s names. But here’s the apostle Paul writing to the church in Rome and he’s calling people out by name who he knows lives there. And many of them, he knows by reputation. He knows that they work hard. They’re workers for the gospel. They’re taking risks for the gospel. So those two things I’m gonna hold up to you: Are you taking risks for the gospel? Now I know some of the countries you come from, taking a risk for the gospel means literally being killed for it. That somebody might actually turn you over to the police or bring a mob and burn down your house with you in it. But even here in America, we feel sometimes threatened. Should I tell this person I’m a Christian? Should I bring the name of Jesus up? Should I tell them that they need Jesus too? And you feel the risk of that. God is calling all of us to be part of his reconciling church. And to be part of it and to serve it, we’re going to have to work and we’re gonna have to take risks. And sometimes, it will cost us a lot. I want to tell you this too: The Holy Spirit is able to help you. You don’t have to do this on your own. It’s not like, “I don’t have courage! I can’t do this!” That’s okay. Just say, “Lord, help me.” The Lord knows that you and I are pretty inept, pretty incapable, and often afraid. Many of us are cowards. Okay, I’m a coward. Help me to talk about Jesus anyway.

I have been in places in my life where my life was at risk. And one reason I became a chaplain in the US Army was a sermon I heard from another student. He had been an infantry officer in Vietnam, and God had protected him and brought him home. And he challenged us as students. He said, “If you’re going to serve the Lord, you need to put yourself someplace where you have to take a risk for Jesus.” And that was my call to go into the army as a chaplain. I felt that’s what God was saying to me. And so I went through a couple of wars in the Middle East and the Lord took care of me. In Africa, I was often stopped at the crossroads and had an AK-47 stuck in my face. And you kind of think, “Hmm… why am I here?” And that was the question they asked me: “Why are you here?” And I said, “I’m here for Jesus’ sake.” I don’t know what God may call upon you to do. But you have entered into a fellowship where you are going to have to identify with each other, even when it could be very inconvenient to do so. But I tell you the world will pay attention when they realize that such folk as you know each other, love each other, acknowledge each other in public, and stand with each other in time of need. That’s what reconciliation is about. So I want to encourage you tonight to be about the work of the gospel, to bring about obedience that comes by faith to all people, and may the Holy Spirit help us all.

Let us pray. Father, forgive us for the times we have been ashamed to be associated with other Christians. Forgive us for the times, Lord, when we have let other suffer and we’ve not stood with them or even knelt down with them to help them. Help me, Lord, to be a better man at loving people, to be one of your saints, one of your children in the church in Jesus Christ. Bless One Voice. Bless this congregation. Let it grow. Let them see many come to Christ. Let many come to the obedience that comes through faith. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Questions for Meditation and Discussion

1) Read Romans 15:8-18
a. To whom was Christ made a servant, and who else received God’s mercy?
b. Paul was a minster of Christ to who, and for what purpose? What does God want from the Gentiles?
c. What does the Gospel do between God and people, and between people?
d. Where does obedience come from?
2) Read Romans 15:25-31, 16:17-19
a. What have these people become, now that they have had faith in Jesus?
b. What are these new groups supposed to do for each other?
c. What are some of the things that Phoebe and others did for Paul, the Gospel, and the Church?
d. What are you to be about? What should be the focus of our lives?