Romans: The Master Key to Scripture

I want to comment briefly on the title of this message, How To Hug. This was suggested to me by a story I once heard about a man who was walking down the street. He passed a used book store, and in the window he saw a book with this title, How To Hug. He was taken by the title and, being of a somewhat romantic nature, went in to buy the book. To his chagrin, he discovered that it was the third volume of an encyclopedia and covered the subjects How to Hug.

Our study in Romans has brought us to that famous passage in Chapter 13 that deals with the Christian and his relationship to the government. It isn't very hard to think of President Jimmy Carter as a servant of God. His personal profession of a new birth has been well publicized. But I wonder if you have ever thought of Leonid Brezhnev as a servant of God? Or Idi Amin? Or even Adolph Hitler? And yet the amazing thing that this passage declares is that men like that are, in some sense, servants of God.

I am sure that many of you feel like I do about Easter. I love Easter -- the triumphal notes of the music, the joy it expresses. I love the hope for which Easter stands, and even the time of year in which it comes, with the beauty of the springtime flowers around us. I always look forward to Easter. Even though I have sung the hymns nine times over this morning, I still love and enjoy them. But I never go through an Easter without feeling, at the end of each year, that something has been missing. Some great truth has remained unexpressed. Somehow or other we focus on some of the great and well-known themes of Easter and miss this one which, in many ways, I think, is the greatest note of all in the Easter Message:

We are back in the fourteenth chapter of Romans this morning, and we are going to be discussing the favorite indoor sport of Christians, that is, trying to change each other. As this passage indicates, this has been a major problem in the church for centuries. All through the history of the church, the problem arises from the attitude that most of us share, I am sure, that God is clearly pleased with the way we live -- but there are those others around. They drink beer and play cards; they go to movies; they smoke cigars; they work on Sundays; they wear lipstick; they dance; they play musical instruments; they use zippers instead of buttons. There is an endless list of things that can be included, debatable matters that the church has never been able to settle because of a misunderstanding of the principles that are set forth here in this very passage.

In our study in Romans 14, we are facing again the troublesome question of different views on such matters as dietary restrictions (whether it is all right to eat meat at certain times or days, or whether we should be free from that); on ritual regulations (such as observance of Sunday or other special days, such as Lent); on ceremonies; and especially, personal preferences in the matter of drinking wine and beer and alcohol, smoking, movies, cosmetics, or whatever.

We are in the fifteenth chapter of this epistle of Romans, and Paul is concluding his discussion of the different views on what is wrong and what is right for Christians. Is it morally right for a Christian to drink wine, beer, or cocktails, or is that wrong? Is it morally wrong for a Christian to keep special days, such as Lent, or is that right? Is it morally wrong for a believer to smoke, or is that right? Is it morally right to eat pork, or is that wrong?

We are drawing to a close in our study of this great epistle to the Romans, and this letter closes just as it began, with a personal word from the apostle about himself, and about the church in Rome. There are two themes in the closing section of Chapter 15 -- one is the church at Rome, and the other is the ministry of the Apostle Paul. I hope you will follow in your Bible, for this is a rather extended passage, and one that I am going to have to move rapidly through. The apostle says (Verse 14):

We have finally reached the last chapter in our study in Romans. Some of you are old enough to remember when we started! I am not going to finish it today, however. The last paragraph is reserved for next Sunday and our Communion service. Many people ignore this chapter, I think, because they see in it nothing but a list of names of people long since dead and gone. But in many ways this is one of the most exciting chapters in Romans, as I think you will see.

We have seen that the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to the Romans from Corinth. And now we have come to the very last paragraph of the letter. Very likely at this point, Paul took the pen and wrote the closing paragraph in his own hand. Paul tells us in Second Thessalonians that this was his custom (2 Thessalonians 3:17). He did this to protect his letters from forgery, for one thing, but also to bear a personal greeting to those to whom he was writing. I think almost all scholars agree that the apostle probably suffered from a serious eye problem. The letter to the Galatians suggests that. So Paul wrote these marvelous words in large letters with his own hand, Verses 25-27: