Romans 15:22-29

22 This is why I have often been hindered from coming to you.

Paul's Plan to Visit Rome
23 But now that there is no more place for me to work in these regions, and since I have been longing for many years to visit you, 24 I plan to do so when I go to Spain. I hope to see you while passing through and to have you assist me on my journey there, after I have enjoyed your company for a while. 25 Now, however, I am on my way to Jerusalem in the service of the Lord's people there. 26 For Macedonia and Achaia were pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the Lord's people in Jerusalem. 27 They were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews' spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings. 28 So after I have completed this task and have made sure that they have received this fruit, I will go to Spain and visit you on the way. 29 I know that when I come to you, I will come in the full measure of the blessing of Christ.


Dig Deeper
As I have had the opportunities to travel outside of the United States and meet many people that are not American, I have discovered just how little most non-Americans around the world actually care about American football. They don’t watch the game, they don’t understand the game, and they just don’t care. It’s sad and shocking, I know, but sadly it’s true. Yet, they have sports that are similar to football that are extremely popular such as soccer and rugby. Most of the world is just as passionate about soccer, and to a lesser degree rugby, as Americans are about college and professional football. The games are similar, true. But there are some major differences between American football and the games like soccer that the rest of the world loves. I was surprised recently to learn that the differences in these games are due to more than just that they happen to be different spots. In fact, there was an intentional effort to make American football an ideologically different sport from existing games like soccer and rugby. Football was actually created to reflect American values at the time that it was invented. Games like soccer and rugby have a decidedly back-and-forth flow to them with no real hard and fast line of scrimmage.

Football is different. There is a very distinct line of scrimmage that cannot be crossed before a play. Once the play has started, football is all about conquering territory, moving your line of scrimmage further into your opponents territory and then holding that ground. Football is really, more than anything else, a territory war. That certainly reflected an ideology that was well accepted in the world at the time that the game of football was invented, and certainly characterized the American concept of manifest destiny. But the intentional differences go beyond that. The man considered to be the father of American football, Walter Camp, also wanted a position that reflected the unique American affinity for having a leader that distinguished themselves from everyone else. Thus, the position of quarterback was developed. He is the captain of the offense that leads this conquest for territory. Each play is an attempt to create a new base of operations in enemy territory to serve as your attacking point for the next play.

So what does all this history of sports have to do with the book of Romans? Paul certainly had genuine love for the Christians in Rome and he wanted to strengthen them in their own right for the glory of God. But Paul had his eye on the future as well. Early in his ministry career, it appears that Paul had used the church in Antioch as his base of operations, so to speak, for his apostolic ministry, as he spread the gospel to new territories. Whenever making a move into enemy territory, it is vital to have a base of operations from which to work. Paul had his heart set on moving the gospel into more and more areas and, as he will make clear in this passage, he wanted to move into Spain. To do so, though, he needed to establish Rome as a base of operations for such an opportunity. Paul was eager to avoid the same sorts of problems, tensions, and misunderstandings between Jews and Gentiles, between the weak and the strong, that had plagued the church in Antioch. The church in Antioch had worked though many of their problems but Paul likely knew how difficult it could be to plant new churches with that constant problem looming in the home church. Paul wanted to gain new territory for the kingdom of God and use it to serve as a base of operations for future inroads into enemy territory. He wanted to lead the ministry of reconciliation throughout the world like a quarterback marching his team down the field.

Up to this point, because he has been busy fulfilling his vocation of spreading the gospel from Jerusalem to Illyricum, Paul had been hindered in his desire to come to them. This is a sometimes frustrating truth that those who sincerely want to work towards the spreading of the gospel must face. You just cannot do it all at once. We must never be so zealous to be about the mission that we stop listening to God and follow his timing. But now, finally, Paul hopes that he will be able to come to them. Yet, he is still careful to not give the wrong impression. The occasion for his visit is not so that he can overhaul the Roman church or simply build on someone else’s foundation. That is not what he has been sent by God to do. Paul makes it clear that his hope is to come to them and build relationships with them and to prepare for his journey into Spain.

Historians still argue to what degree Rome had colonized Spain by Paul’s day, but it is clear that Paul’s desire was to spread the gospel into that area. To do so, he knew that he needed to have Rome behind him as a supporting church and a base of operation from which to launch his mission into Spain. Paul’s mission was to preach the gospel in areas that had never heard it before, but he knew that he needed a base, a pillar church so to speak, to support that. But before he could do that, he needed a church that truly understood what it meant to live out the fact that all people, Jew and Gentile, had been justified, or declared to be in the right as members of God’s covenant family, based on faith in the life of Christ alone. Rome needed to begin to realize the kind of unity that was truly available to a mature Messiah-shaped family.

Interestingly, it does not appear that Paul ever made it to Spain. He did come to Rome but there is nothing in history to indicate that Paul lived to realize his dream of spreading the gospel into the region of Spain. This raises a question that we need to consider. Why would God apparently give Paul such a dream (surely Paul felt called by God to go to Spain and to set up many aspects of his ministry during his last years in order to get there) that he never realized? The answer to this question is important. I think we need to realize that God does call us to do things and dream of things and even put a great deal of work towards those things, knowing full well that we will not be the one to fully realize that dream. It might just be that all God wants us to do is to take those initial steps. It will be someone else’s job to take the next steps. This keeps us from thinking too highly of ourselves; It keeps others from relying too much on one person; and it causes us to humbly work together and remember that these are ultimately God’s dreams not ours. Paul apparently did not make it to Spain to declare the gospel but someone else did quite soon thereafter and it’s highly probable that this was a result of the early steps that Paul took to open the door to Spain. Perhaps Paul didn’t see the realization of his dream but God did and that’s what really matters.

Before he can get to that, however, Paul wants to finish up the massive collection that he had been working at taking up around the Gentile churches to help the brothers and sisters in Jerusalem. It may have been a combination of famine, persecution, and even their initial zeal to pool their resources, but the Jerusalem church was facing some severe economic problems. Paul deeply desired for the Gentile churches to step up, even though many of them struggled with poverty to lesser degrees themselves, and to share their resources with the disciples in Jerusalem. This was more demanding than we might realize at first blush. It was from Jerusalem that most of the early opposition to the Gentile churches came. It was not the entire church that was to blame, but certainly Christians that were part of the Jerusalem church were the ones that had attempted to convince the Gentile Christians that they were justified by following the law of Moses rather than being full covenant family members solely based on being in Christ. How easy would it have been for Paul to focus on his mission to spread the gospel into new Gentile areas, to tolerate the Jews that were part of those churches, and to simply write off the church in Jerusalem?

If he were conforming to the pattern of the world, that might have absolutely been the easier action. Think of how much simpler it would have made things to have a Jewish Christian church and a Gentile Christian church. That way they could each follow their own customs, cultural practices and preferences, and live out the reality of the gospel in their own way. It would have been easier, but it would have ceased to be communities built around the genuine gospel. As Paul has worked out throughout the balance of this letter, the true effect of the gospel is that it creates the one, true family in Christ. There should be no such divisions in God’s covenant family. Thus, Paul’s collection for the brothers and sisters in Jerusalem are a gritty and real-life example of working out the theology of being part of God’s family in Christ. It was absolutely vital that Jews and Gentiles that had entered into Christ realize that they were really part of the same family based only on their commonality of being in Christ. That meant that they live like family even if the very people they were now being called on to help had not quite treated them according to the same reality. Paul was calling the Gentile churches to truly live out their belief that they had been justified by faith. They were to act like God’s family even when, and perhaps especially when, the very people they were helping had not acted like family. This is what self-sacrificial love looks like in the real world. Isn’t it high time that we all as individual Christians and, more importantly, as Christian communities, truly begin to wrestle with these truths and firmly embrace living them out in our own lives and churches?


Devotional Thought
Are you as deeply committed to being a part of God’s family as we are called to be? Are you committed to God’s covenant family and his church because of Christ or, in reality, does your commitment really rely more on what the people in your church do or don’t do? If other people could ever do something to make you walk away from God’s covenant family, then is your faith in them or in God? This is a serious question that demands that we take some time to seriously consider it.