Most Bible translations soften what Paul says in the opening line of Romans: “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus” (1:1).  That sounds okay.  Jesus came to serve, and we like being served; we know we are called to be servants—as many hymns remind us.  It can be nice to play the part for a while.  But while Paul would definitely approve of our thinking of ourselves as servants, he would also encourage us to think of ourselves—seriously—as more.  Where we read servant, the word Paul uses is doulos, which in the Greek of the time was the standard, ordinary word for a slave: “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus.”  Well, we don’t like that!  It reminds us of the blemish upon our history.  Slave is not really a happy or even a neutral word anywhere.

Nowhere and in no way, for us, is a slave a comforting, encouraging, or positive image.  But Paul uses it very intentionally, biblically, along with many other New Testament writers.  So, is he angry about it?  Is it miserable, being the slave of Christ: just grinding misery?  On the contrary—in it Paul finds great comfort, hope, joy, and peace!  No wonder some thought he was a crackpot.

The word, slave, clarifies the true nature of the relationship.  A servant, typically, is hired; the arrangement is negotiated and entered into voluntarily by both parties.  A servant is paid.  A servant can quit whenever for whatever reason.  The servant still belongs to him or herself.  Not so a doulos, a slave.  A slave is owned, bought for a price.  A servant has stated work hours and stated time off from work.  Not so a slave.  A servant can be dismissed.  A slave is disciplined.  A servant has an employer, a boss.  A slave has a master, a lord.  When we use the word lord in talking about Jesus, at root it means just this: the lord is the one who owns us, to whom we belong, and to whose obedience we are bound.  Our lord is the one who rules our life.  So, it matters who our lord is, very much.  Our lord, whoever or whatever it happens to be, is the one whom we obey, as Scripture reminds us many times in many ways.

In line with a most honorable lineage in the Old Testament, many of the New Testament writers identify themselves as a doulos of Christ.  The doulos of God does as God says, even when what God says may feel difficult, unpleasant, or even risky—like Jonah going to Nineveh, or Jeremiah continuing to prophesy despite death threats, arrest, and imprisonment, or the first believers weathering all manner of assaults from outside and from within the body.  There is no indication that calling oneself the slave of God or the slave of Christ was seen as regrettable or stifling.  It’s part of God’s call into another life of righteousness and holiness, devotion to God: constant, faithful service.  Perfect service?  No.  Service entirely without fault, failure, or stumbling?  No.  My younger son, Evan, when he was much younger, had a knack for falling and failing to use his hands to break his fall; face first, bam!  Ouch.  He got off the school bus from kindergarten one day.  I was there, still several paces away, to meet him and walk him home.  He began to run to me; he stumbled, fell . . . on his face, bam.  He started to bleed from his mouth.  So, did I stand there at a distance, tell him to get up, and criticize him for his fall, his failure?  Beloved, I knelt there and held him as he cried, and I felt his hurt.  My strongest sense is that God does the same for all of us, if we’ll allow Him.

We’re okay with doing the Christian thing here for an hour—please not much longer, than that, though!  The point, however, is to be a Christian, consistent, faithful, obedient, prayerful, out there, always.  We know that’s not so easy.  So did Paul.  So did the first Christians, who had to figure out how to do this and preserve this blessed way of life against all threats from outside, and inside, in a world where there were very few Christians.  They had each other; they had the authorized teaching; they had Scripture; they had Christ.

Paul points to his apostleship; that makes him an authorized teacher of the authorized teaching.  The word apostle, as I hope you may remember, means one who is sent, with a vitally important message.  As we read Paul’s letters, it becomes clear that there were more apostles in the early church than the eleven close disciples of Jesus, Matthias whom the eleven brought in to complete the twelve, and Paul.  The group of apostles, however, was still a small, select group; their authority was acknowledged throughout the church, though not always without dissension, criticism, and resistance: the more things change . . .  What were the qualifications of an apostle?  William Barclay points to two factors: knowing Jesus personally and having been a witness to the resurrected Christ.[1]

Not every believer was an apostle; not every believer needed to be, but every believer has been called into new life in Christ.  It doesn’t take long, reading almost anywhere in the New Testament, to see that, at the heart of the call is a new life, a changed life, a hallowed life, not like the old life, the former ways, former deeds, former thoughts and ways of thinking.  Every believer is called to be a demonstration of the gospel at work in our lives, in our living.

Ideally, for all of us, demonstrating the new life would not only involve a reconsideration of how we dress, what we put into our bodies, how we speak, and how we employ our resources; the new life would also include frequent attendance at and active involvement in the congregation: we need one another, and it’s one of the great pities of our Christian living that we don’t quite seem to know how to invest fully in our fellowship.  Here with one another is where we shall find encouragement for discipleship and Christian growth.  Let’s therefore strive more actively to keep practicing genuine concern for one another.  Now, please do not mistake me: I am not saying we do not have genuine concern for one another.  Quite the opposite!  I am saying it becomes easy to neglect this concern or take it for granted if we do not actively, intentionally practice it with one another.  This does not mean we should all be nosy busybodies butting in or criticizing.  It means we strive to have genuine conversations, candid praying with one another, that we bear one another’s burdens, mutually.  The apostles urged this as the way of the Church.

All we know of what Jesus said and did—the gospel—comes to us through the apostles.  We receive, maintain, and hand on the apostolic tradition.  Paul writes that the good news is not new news but very old, venerable, praiseworthy: it is “the gospel [God] promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures” (1:2).  Scripture is the outworking of a good promise God made; our Bible reading and comprehension is greatly helped when we read with God’s sure promise in view.  If we trust, we do so from faith through grace: gifts of God, so we know God is indeed fulfilling His promise because we have come to believe.

Paul reminds us that this eternal promise, stated more clearly and fully over the course of Israel’s history, has to do with God’s “Son, who according to the flesh was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord” (1:3-4).  Pause there.  Paul likes to load his sentences, caught up in the rich complexity, the holy wonder, of what God has done.  It never ceases to amaze and delight Paul that we should have a God who does such things for us.  Paul makes a clear distinction: Jesus Christ has two natures, human and divine.  He is fully, truly a man; he is fully, truly, God.  Theologians never have figured this out and never will.  It is a blessed mystery, part of God’s eternal purpose and plan.  For us, it is Good News: God wants us to know that He came to relate to us as person to person, just like the person sitting next to you: fellowship.  He came to be just that close, just that unassuming; to put His hand on us, to help us to know that He is listening, carefully, to let us see His smile and see His sorrow: He knows our burdens.  But flesh cannot save flesh.  Christ comes to us, then, also fully God, fully able to save.

Jesus came of David’s lineage, Paul reminds us.  We may not see any special importance in that: why should lineage matter so much?  Most of us can barely trace our ancestry back beyond maybe our great grandparents, let alone a thousand years back.  God made a promise to David, that the king of Israel would always be a descendant of David, anointed to oversee and shepherd God’s people.  God is a promise keeper.  Now, Israel had had no king of its own for a long time, some five hundred years.  This was not a failure of the promise.  When the time of the king comes, the king will be a descendant of David, because God is faithful, keeping His promises.  I suppose we’ve all made a promise at least once in our lives that we failed to keep, and we know how that feels and maybe we’ve become a bit wiser because of it.  God always keeps His promises.

Everyone who investigated the matter knew that the Messiah would be a descendant of David.  It was foretold.  As the guys attending the men’s Bible study are seeing, David is one of the central figures in the Old Testament, not just king but as servant, slave, of God.  Perfectly so?  No.  We know.  But even in the lapses and poor choices and the temptations to which David yielded, still, at the root, the core, the heart of his being, was vital, surging love for God, a man after God’s own heart, concerned for the things that concern God, concerned for maintaining a vital, healthy walk with God.  God had given David such a heart.

Paul is also saying that it was the Spirit of holiness coming upon the flesh that gave Jesus the power required for his mission, his purpose.  In the early church, there were debates as to just when that Spirit came upon Jesus.  Obviously, a real contender was at his baptism in the Jordan by John: the dove and the voice from heaven.  As Jesus reminds us, though, these manifestations were not for Jesus but for those witnessing.  It’s Luke who provides the key piece of information: Mary has no idea how she will bear a child, as she has never been with a man.  The angel tells her: the Spirit will overshadow her, and the child will be conceived through the Spirit; what is conceived through the Spirit is of the Spirit, as Jesus reminds Nicodemus, among others.  So, Jesus entering into the fullness of his divine nature is not some late addition, thirty years into his life.  He was, from conception, fully divine, too.  And we do not understand how a child can be conceived without the necessary organic, genetic contribution from the father, but all things are possible for God.

We’ve never had to understand to believe.  How well do you know how nuclear power works?  Or a jet engine?  Or how oil is refined into gasoline?  How well do you understand how your phone works, or the human body?  Yet we put our faith in all these: we pump the mystery gas into our vehicles; we’re glad there’s electricity when we turn on the switch; we fly here and there, trusting at thirty thousand feet that the mystery engines will work; we enjoy our phones immensely, and we live without very great concern for just how our body does what it does, so long as it keeps doing it.

Paul goes on to tell us that the Resurrection is the testimony that Christ has all power to fulfill God’s promise.  The Resurrection is another mystery at which many, even, I’m sad to say, in some churches, balk.  It’s not merely a metaphor of rebirth, beloved, or a new, moral life.  The Resurrection is how we know Jesus is in the power of the Spirit, the holiness of the Spirit: light, fire, life.  This is why Christ, risen, appeared to the women on Easter morning, then to the apostles, to Peter, to James the brother of Jesus, and to others.  No way to deny that he was truly alive, truly in a body, a glorified body.  Death could not imprison him, had no lasting power over him.  Christ is stronger than sin.  He is stronger than death.  He is God, holy in divine splendor and power.

So, Paul, very early in Romans, is outlining some huge mysteries, pointing in passing to the deep things of God, deep things in which all of us, as believers, participate.  What an awesome God.  And, in Christ, we belong to God.  Let’s continue all our lives to delve, amazed and delighted, into the rich meaningfulness of belonging to God, having a holy lord, and living in obedience to His will.  And one of the deepest things, for Paul, is the Resurrection: everything hinges upon Christ rising.  Everything changes because of that.  There is sure hope, because of that.  This hope, this confidence we now have in Christ is the hope of resurrection; it is the hope of faith, and it is the confidence of obedience.

Paul points to the centrality of this hopeful confidence when he summarizes his mission: “to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake” (1:5).  Obedience, first, involves listening.  We can’t do as we are told if we do not hear what we are being told.  If we listen to Jesus, it is because Jesus matters to us, and if he matters to us, this is the work of the Spirit in us.  When we have a true and vital relationship with Jesus, as we come to know him, we come to trust him; we put our faith in him.  As we put our faith in him, we begin to live the way he has shown us, the way he tells us.  If we obey at all, we do so from a willing heart, not a grudging heart.  The willing heart is the gift of faith, faith in the most excellent man ever to walk among us, faith in our most excellent God, who does not fail us and fulfills every promise.  He promises to save those whom He has called.  Paul was called and sent to call.  We have heard that call and, as we have received the good news, as we trust in Jesus Christ as our Savior and our Lord, we have blessed assurance that we, also, are among those called to life, saved for life and “called to be his holy people” (1:7).  What it means to be God’s holy people we continue to learn.  Let us learn, together.  We’re in a season of gifts and wishes.  Let us long for the gift of learning; let us wish, let us want, to learn.

[1] William Barclay.  Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians.  1956.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1976.  145-146.