Romans 15:14-21

Paul the Minister to the Gentiles
14 I myself am convinced, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge and competent to instruct one another. 15 Yet I have written you quite boldly on some points to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me 16 to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles. He gave me the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.
17 Therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God. 18 I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done— 19 by the power of signs and wonders, through the power of the Spirit of God. So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. 20 It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else's foundation. 21 Rather, as it is written:
"Those who were not told about him will see,
and those who have not heard will understand." [g]


Dig Deeper
Almost every season while I was coaching high school basketball, we would have someone on the team that very few people expected would ever play basketball at that level. The reason was that I would annually go watch the football team at our school play. I wasn’t particularly interested in watching the football games but I was scouting. I wanted to find someone that was fast, aggressive, athletic, and just a little bit crazy. The reason for that was that our team played a unique style of defense and we needed someone each year that matched those qualities. We didn’t necessarily need that guy to be a basketball player just as long as he could play the game fairly well. But almost every year I would manage to find a football player like that who could play a little basketball but would not have considered themselves a basketball player by any stretch of the imagination. Believe it or not, that’s exactly the kind of guy I wanted. Each year we would take that guy and teach him to be what we called our “bulldog” defender. He didn’t have to do much on offense, we didn’t need him to. He had a very specific role and purpose and that’s all he needed to know and to do. The basic job of this individual was to take the other team’s best player out of their offense each game. The system worked so well in fact that in my eight years of coaching, we had six conference defensive players of the year. I’m convinced that it worked so well, because these guys were so singularly focused on what their role was. They didn’t get distracted by trying to be something they weren’t. Sure, they would contribute in other areas when they could, but for the most part they stayed focused like a laser on playing defense on one player.

It really is a wonderful thing when you know exactly what you’re supposed to do in a given situation. Whether it be a sports team, a business, or even a church, I believe the most successful organizations are the ones where everyone knows their role and has a pretty good understanding of what they are supposed to be doing. In biblical terms, that concept is often referred to as one’s sending. I believe that each Christian has a particular sending that they need to seek, find, and do with passion and zeal. No one exemplifies that truth more than the apostle Paul. Paul knew exactly what he had been sent by God to do. He wrote, “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God. . . Through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to faith and obedience for his name's sake” (Rom. 1:1, 5). Paul knew that he had received the unique vocation of being a pioneering apostle to the Gentile world. He knew with a singular focus that his primary purpose as an apostle was to establish churches around the Gentile world that could serve to further the future advance of the gospel. It was not Paul’s role to stay very long at a church or to dig in and focus on the long-term project of shepherding a specific congregation. That was important work that others would be sent to do. Paul knew very well that he was sent to spread the gospel in a very particular way among the Gentiles and that’s precisely what he would do.

As Paul begins his closing remarks, in which he uses similar elements that we find in a majority of Paul’s letters, he takes a very careful tone with what he is saying. Paul knows well that the Roman church was in a unique situation for him in that he did not, evidently, play a role in establishing the church. We don’t actually know for certain who did plant the small church in Rome but we do know that later church tradition purported it to be Peter. If we take that to be a correct assertion then we can understand all the more why Paul is careful not to offend. So, just as he opened up the letter with an almost apologetic tone (Rom. 1:11-12), he now returns to that.

He wanted to make it clear that he didn’t think any less of them than any other group of Christians. Paul firmly believed that they were full of goodness, and were quite intelligent Christians that were knowledgeable and quite capable of instructing one another. He doesn’t want to imply that they were inept or didn’t know any of the things that he has laid out in this letter, although unless they were among the most brilliant group of theologians that has ever lived, we can be certain that they had learned quite a few things from Paul’s letter. But Paul wanted to be clear that he is not assuming anything about them. He will give them the benefit of the doubt and assert that he was simply reminding them of the truth that they already. Sure, he may have taken it to a much deeper level than they had ever thought through before, but the general concepts were probably not anything radically new.

But if Paul did not plant this church, why would he feel that he had the authority or that their was even a need for him to write and remind them of anything? It was because Paul knew what he was sent to do. He was more than willing to walk into a potentially uncomfortable situation, albeit very carefully, because he knew that even though he had not planted this church, it was full of Gentiles and that was definitely part of his mission. He does not hesitate to write boldly to this church that is largely Gentile because he was called to be a “minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles.” In fact he pictures himself as being a priest whose job it is to lay an acceptable sacrifice on the altar. In this case, it is the living sacrifice of the Gentiles themselves (Rom. 12:1). Paul doesn’t fancy himself to be an actual priest of some sort, rather he knows that the Old Testament priesthood and sacrificial system have been replaced by obedient Christians who have willingly died to themselves. Nor does Paul only care about the salvation of the Gentiles with no concern for the Jews. A quick reading of chapters 9-11 will quickly dispel that notion. It’s not that Paul has no concern for the salvation or spiritual well-being of the Jewish people, it is that he knows very well what his specific service to God is and it is to that that he will stick.

Paul’s desire was to focus on the specific task that God had given him to lead “the Gentiles to obey God.” That is where he would spend his energy and that is why he has written this letter. Rome was a church that consisted of both Jews and Gentiles but the church was firmly in a Gentile area and so Paul felt that it was well within the realm of his ministry to take an interest in this church. Not only that, but as we will see in the remainder of this chapter, Paul had specific plans for this church that were an important part of his ongoing mission to the Gentiles.

Yet Paul knew well that it was not by his power or prowess that his mission was being accomplished. It was by the power of the signs and wonders (typical biblical language for miracles) that the Spirit had made manifest through the first-century church. But what did Paul mean when he said that “from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ”? Paul’s point in mentioning Jerusalem and Illyricum likely have to do with him demonstrating the the limits of his ministry. It had started, however briefly, in Jerusalem and had stretched all the way to Illyricum, a region to the northwest of Macedonia (modern-day Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina). By declaring to have proclaimed the gospel of Christ fully, Paul was not trying to claim that the gospel had been preached to every single person in that area, but probably more likely is that he meant that the regions in which he had been so far were complete, in that pillar churches had been planted so that they could serve as staging points for the further infiltration of the gospel throughout those regions. To paraphrase in our vernacular today then, Paul was saying something like, “I have planted the foundational churches all the way from here to Timbuktu.”

It was Paul’s specific task to proclaim the gospel to the places where Christ “was not known,” or quite literally “where Christ has not been named.” In other words, it was not his calling to go around and strengthen churches that had already taken root; it was his task to proclaim the gospel in places where there was no church and to establish one there. It was his mission to go into the Gentile world and establish churches strategically in new territories so that future generations would be in position to continue to carry the gospel to every creature under heaven. As we have already seen, Paul was not against “building on someone else’s foundation,” that was a much-needed task. That simply was not what he was doing. He was not writing Rome in order to play the role of shepherd or to try to take authority over the church. Paul had other things in mind; things that were in keeping with his mission and he was writing to Rome to build them up because he is already looking past Rome to other places in the world that desperately needed to hear the gospel.

As he usually does, Paul finishes his point with a quotation from the Old Testament. This time it is from Isaiah 52:15. This quote is appropriate because it speaks to his desire to not build on another’s foundation but to proclaim the gospel to those had not yet been told and had not yet heard about the Servant of the Lord. It is of no coincidence that Paul takes this quotation from a passage of Scripture that describes the faithful Servant of the Lord who will cleanse the nations that had not previously heard of him. This was Paul’s mission, then. He knew what it was. He stayed focused on it. And everything he did played an important part of what he was sent to do. This stands as a stark reminder for churches and for individual Christians to seek out and be as clear about what God has called us to do as Paul was. Whether it’s to be a teacher or an incredibly hospitable servant, find out what you were sent to do and do it with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength.


Devotional Thought
Do you know what you were sent to do within the realm of your Christian calling? If you do, then do it with all your might. If you don’t spend focused time praying that God will reveal it to you.