The Beauty of Gospel Relationships (Rom. 12:1–8)

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Ray Ortlund
No one is simply useful to me for my purposes. If we are members individually of one another, then Sam, I would be personally diminished if you weren’t in my life. We have got to stop treating one another in terms of cost benefit calculations and see one another dare to see one another in these biblical categories of individually, members of one another.

Sam Allberry
Welcome back to you’re not crazy. This is our fourth season. We’re delighted to have you with us again, Ray, good to be with you. It’s a privilege to be with you. Sam and Ray for this season, we’re doing something, I think, quite special, something that we’re both pretty excited about. We’re going through Romans 12 through 15. Why is that so significant? Well,

Ray Ortlund
I have a friend here in Nashville who calls Romans the gorilla of the New Testament, because it is so robust and theologically rich, and the teachings of Romans are so foundational for all of Christianity. Romans is not denominationally specific. It’s just Christian. It’s the gospel. And here chapters 12 through 15, Paul takes the doctrine of chapters one through 11 and translates it into our relationships together, and in stepping from the doctrine to the to the culture. He’s not stepping down, he’s stepping up. So the fullness of Christian orthodoxy includes the beauty of human relationships. That’s what we’re talking about here in Romans. 1215, yeah,

Sam Allberry
verse I think of as being a kind of theme. Verse For this whole section is Romans 12, verse nine, where it says, Let love be genuine. Because I think Paul is implying, then we’ll get to this in due course, that it’s easy for us to think we’re loving each other when maybe we’re not loving each other genuinely. That’s a sobering thought. Wow. These chapters are going to help us love each other genuinely. So we’re going to be diving in in this first episode to Romans 12 verses one through to verse eight. And lots of things going on in this verse Ray, but one of the things Paul talks about is not having, not thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. And there’s a, there’s a sort of very serious point behind that, but there’s also, I thought it’d be fun, actually, just to think, what are some of the daft ways each of us tend to overestimate our own capacity. It

Ray Ortlund
is really good. I am really good at ridiculousness. For example, here’s how I overestimate myself and stumble over myself. My my gifts and strengths can also be my undoing. I take the Bible seriously. I was trained at Dallas Seminary to do serious exegesis and so on. I use the original text, all of which I revere, all of which is right, but however right, one aspect of ministry is if I do this without moment by moment, dependence upon the Lord, it spirals out of control into something odd, unhelpful and to some degree ridiculous. So remembering that giftedness alone is a pitfall, but giftedness, humbled before the Lord, is blessable. That distinction is very important to me. How about you, Sam?

Sam Allberry
I mean, lots of me, my capacities for ridiculousness are endless. But two things come to my mind. One is I overestimate how much energy I’m going to have. So I sort of think, oh, I can. I can come back from that, from that trip, and then go straight into three days of meeting, and then straight into something else. And it looks neat and tidy on my calendar, but I keep forgetting that I’m a I’m a limited, frail human being who gets weary, and a sort of sillier version is, if I’ve got, you know, a few days off, I will, I will massively overestimate how much I think I’m going to get read. You know, I’ll, I’ll take six books away with me for a week, and I might read half of one of them, but I’m always saying, Oh, I’ll read that. I’ll get all, you know, I’ve got a flight coming up. I’ll read this book, and then write that paper, and then and I get about 10% done of what I thought I was going to get done, I think I’m going to be far more productive than I am.

Ray Ortlund
That’s very interesting, because I see you as incredibly resilient and productive and unstoppable.

Sam Allberry
Have you met me?

Ray Ortlund
But I wonder, Sam, in the New Earth, when we’re in the new creation, we ourselves have been renewed, maybe we’ll take those six books with us and we will actually experience the joy and satisfaction of reading them deeply with understanding. Maybe these expectations that we have of ourselves that right now are under. Realistic are, in a sense, prophetic. Oh, wow. And we’re going to find out in the new earth, by God’s grace alone, for His glory alone, what we’re actually capable of. Wow. Now

Sam Allberry
that’s an exciting thought.

Ray Ortlund
So here we are in Romans 12, one through eight. Let’s look at verses one through two. Sam, what stands out to you in Romans, 12, one through two. Oh

Sam Allberry
man. I mean, these are these obviously very well known verses. This is Paul’s gateway into the whole rest of the letter. We’ve just had 11 chapters expounding the mercies of God. And now he’s saying in the light of that, given that here’s what you’re to do, and that the first thing is to is to present yourselves to God as a living sacrifice. I can give myself to the Lord. I can offer myself to the Lord, and he will receive me. Because of the mercies of God, he will receive me. I can be an acceptable offering to Him. It’s not so much you. You have to do this as you now. Get to do this. You get to give your life to the Lord, and he will receive your life and use it. That’s just that still astonishes me. I still there are many unevangelized parts of my heart that still don’t believe that, that I can, each day give myself to the Lord by His mercies and be received by him well

Ray Ortlund
said, that is amazing. Such grace for me, these verses help me step over the line from I am available to Christ, to I am expendable. For Christ, I don’t draw the line anywhere and say, You have me up to this point, but I’m taking myself back beyond that.

Sam Allberry
Yeah, when you say, present your bodies that that is a total category, isn’t it?

Ray Ortlund
What else do we have? What stands out to me here is this remarkable phrase, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. And of course, I think of the young pastors with the ministry of the word at that point, that’s all we’re doing. Really, we’re helping ourselves and everyone in the church we serve to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. That word renewal means we are not recycling old familiar Christianity. We are discovering new regions of the fullness of authentic Christianity. If we’re not open to what is new, how can we say we’re being transformed by the renewal of our minds so open minds with open Bibles, those two together God can detonate unprecedented blessing through open Bibles and open minds coming together, not recycling the same old, same old, but daring to live in what is for us in this generation, unprecedented expendability for Christ. Yeah,

Sam Allberry
I don’t ever want to get to the stage in my Christian life where I can no longer be surprised by scripture, surprised by Jesus. There’s it’s humbling to think that there won’t be a day of my life where I don’t need more renewal, but it’s exciting to know that that renewal is always going to be available to me. Yes, there’s always something more of Christ to be wowed by, more to learn, more to grow in.

Ray Ortlund
Let’s think out loud here for a second. We didn’t talk about this before we began recording what is something within the last year that a new glimpse of Christ in His grace and glory that you’ve seen that hadn’t really landed on you before. There

Sam Allberry
have been many. There actually have been several occasions where I’ve I’ve had to just stop and answer to find myself reeling in a good way because of the sheer kindness of Jesus. A couple of weeks ago, something just leapt out of me from a familiar scripture that I’ve never noticed before. I think it was Hebrews four, that our Lord is not unable to sympathize, but it’s been tested in every way, as we are, but without sin. And that just hit me with with some read those verses before. I sort of understood those verses before, but it hit me with such newness, just how there is no pain or testing I can go through that he doesn’t know better than I do, which makes him someone who really knows how to care for me. It’s an expression of His kindness that really lifted my spirits at a difficult moment.

Ray Ortlund
My answer to that would be, I think it was two weeks ago I was looking at David Paul listens wonderful book. Good and angry, which is a very insightful, as we would understand, coming from David palace and such a sage, an insightful view into morally legitimate anger, good and angry. And he makes the point in there. And I’d never thought of Our Lord this way. He is angry. He is good and angry. He is angry at all oppression, all injustice, whenever we are mistreated, he is not glib and shallow and smiley about that. He is angry at all that is wrong. Therefore we have an advocate who is in profound solidarity with us, who is on our side, and when we are mistreated, he takes it personally, like wow, but he is good and angry, and his anger, I don’t trust my moral fervor, and I don’t trust anybody else’s but I trust his anger. That’s

Sam Allberry
true, because if, if he is channeling his utterly pure moral fervor, we don’t need to be having hissy fits every second minute about everything that’s going wrong. I’m also thinking with this ray that, you know, being transformed by the renewal of our mind. We’re Christianity is ongoing transformation, and particularly given we’re speaking primarily to younger pastors and others as well who are listening. But I think one of the dangers in pastoral ministry is that we feel we’re meant to give the impression that we’ve we’ve got to where we’re meant to be going. And so actually, part of pastoral leadership is communicating our own ongoing need for further transformation and renewal. Paul talks in the pastoral epistles about that all may see your progress. And I think there’s a similar point being made here. It’s good for our churches to see us growing, to see us making new discoveries, to see us entering into renewal. That

Ray Ortlund
reminds me of Dr Wilbur Smith, who was a Bible teacher, a significant Bible teacher in my grandparents’ generation, and in 1948 he was one of the founding faculty members of Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. When it was just getting underway. I never heard Wilbur Smith preach or teach a single time without at some point his saying, here is something in this passage I saw this week, and I’ve never seen this before. Wow, and he’d been studying the Bible carefully all his life. I love that. That’s and I try to remember to do that very thing.

Sam Allberry
Yeah, it’s encouraging to hear that, because it communicates to the congregation that you’re you’re a sheep, as well as being a shepherd, you’re still being led forwards by the Lord, and that it doesn’t matter how old, mature learned there’s Jesus has got so much more to knock our socks off with,

Ray Ortlund
and that is when church starts feeling more exciting, when all of us, when the pastor is setting the tone, it’s like we’re all sitting on the edge of our seats seeing new vistas of Jesus in His grace and glory. We’re all seeing new things about scripture, new things about life and what it’s really like, and with this openness and honesty, with our open Bibles, we’re on a journey together of a journey of discovery and and endless newness. We’re sharing this together when a when a pastor cultivates in the church not just the reinforcement of what has been understood, but the discovery of what we’ve never seen before that is downright fun.

Sam Allberry
It really is. It’s an adventure now.

Ray Ortlund
Sam in verses three through eight of Romans 12. What is it that stands out to you there? We’re

Sam Allberry
just thinking about we’re not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought to think. And as Paul then unpacks that, it’s very clear that thinking with sober judgment, which is the positive flip side, also involves thinking of ourselves, not in isolation, but is as belonging to the people of God. In Verse five, we are one body in Christ, individually, members one of another. In other words, I’m not just connected to my church. I I belong to it in that not that I belong to the institution called Emmanuel Nashville, but I belong to the people that form Emmanuel Nashville. And if I don’t see that, I won’t think of myself with saber judgment.

Ray Ortlund
I find these chapters compelling and captivating, and it’s emerging with greater clarity as we go through chapter 12, because I need the word beauty to I don’t see that word here in the text, but that’s the category that I reach for to describe. Tribe, the totality that we’re sort of staring at here in Romans 12 through 15. I remember Sam 50 years ago, Janney and I were at the Lausanne Congress on world evangelization that Billy Graham and John Stott and others cooked up. And it was a wonderful event. I heard Francis Schaeffer speak there in July of 1974 and he said, if we want to see something profound happen in this generation, and we do, then our churches must resonate with two contents and two realities. The first content is strong doctrine. The second content is honest answers to honest questions. And I love that combination, a message from above and sensitivity to our mission field. The two realities are, one, authentic spirituality, really walking in the power of the Holy Spirit, and secondly, the second reality, the beauty of human relationships. Our churches emphasize programs, and I understand that that’s not daft. There’s a legitimate place for programs. There are delivery systems for ministry, but we don’t see church programs in the New Testament. What we do see is the beauty of human relationships. Again, I’m just trying to feel my way forward on this, so push back on me. Help me make this better. A church is an institution. Legitimately, an institution is not a bad thing. It’s a good thing. An institution is a social mechanism for making a desirable experience easily repeatable, like a Jane Austen Book Club is an institution. College football in the autumn is an institution. That’s not a problem. It’s just a way of structuring reality such that good things keep happening. Now, if a ministry program at church is an institution that truly makes that desirable experience easily repeatable, it’s working, and that desirable experience is the beauty of human relationships. But the problem with us and our institutions is they tend inevitably to claim too much for themselves, and they that the delivery system itself gains authority rather than that positive experience it’s supposed to facilitate.

Sam Allberry
Yeah, man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath for man exactly, if that’s the case of something that has come down from heaven, then even more, is it the case of something we’ve we’ve cooked up. How

Ray Ortlund
do we rethink pastoral ministry such that church programs are given their place, they have their usefulness. But what it’s really about, and this is foremost in our mind, is the beauty of human relationships, because that’s all Paul talks about here. Yeah. Well, it’s interesting,

Sam Allberry
because the as you know, the New Testament, gives us various pictures of what church life is like. And it does talk about church being a building, you know, in terms of we’re living stones being built up together, the people of God are being edified. So we’re going to need some processes and systems in place for that. And you see lists of widows in First Timothy and and things like that. But the most common picture, by far, is the church being a family. Yes, so there will be a need for some of that relational infrastructure, but it’s because the church is a family, and that the danger can be whether the church is there to serve the program, rather than the program being there to serve the church Exactly. And we see some of that even in these in these verses, because Paul is talking about the church being like the body. He says talks about that in other places too. We’re members of one another. We don’t all have the same function, which means that no person is unnecessary, yes, and no person is ultimate. So that helps us think about ourselves in sober judgment. I can’t say I don’t need them, but I also can’t say they don’t need me. And Paul is anticipating the different ways people will will serve and contribute. He mentions here a few different gifts, as we tend to call them, prophecy, serving, teaching, exhorting, generosity, all these different things. And we need all of them, and some of them will need some structure around them.

Ray Ortlund
He says here in verse five, we are individually members, one of another. If that’s true, and it is, we’re not members, like pennies in a jar. You can turn it upside down, the penny scatter, and nothing really changes. We’re members, as he says here, like a human body. I cannot biblically. Me look at anyone at Emmanuel church or St Patrick’s Anglican and say I can’t perceive them through a lens of cost benefit assessment. No one is simply useful to me for my purposes. If we are members individually of one another, then Sam, I would be personally diminished if you weren’t in my life, we have got to stop treating one another in terms of cost benefit calculations and see one another dare to see one another in these biblical categories of individually members of one another.

Sam Allberry
I’m incomplete without the people of God around me, but it also means, and some of us are, our tendency is to have a lower view of ourselves than we should. It also means I can’t write myself off and say I don’t I don’t matter here. I have nothing to bring here. I’m just a net drain on everybody else, because, in God’s sovereignty. Somehow, the rest of the body needs me, too. Each of us has a part to play.

Ray Ortlund
You know, he uses this language in verse six, the grace given to us. That’s that’s what’s happening here. That’s the wonder of being a church together, the grace given not to me, not to you, to us. We’re walking into this environment of shared grace. Oh, my goodness,

Sam Allberry
I love that. Paul was very conscious of that, because he you know, every time he talks about his apostleship, it’s by the will of God. It’s not that Paul passed his apostleship exams, it’s, it’s God’s grace to him, every everything, anything we get to be and to do for one another, and as the people of God together, is, is by the grace given us.

Ray Ortlund
One of the great things about being a pastor is cultivating and nurturing this sense, this awareness, this sense of wonder that we’re even here at all. Yeah, what am I doing here? How did how did I land here? This is such a privilege. This is a grace given to us. It’s great to be together.

Sam Allberry
It is and it stops us from from the foolishness of thinking that the church is our client. We have, we belong as the pastor to the members of the church. We need them, and it’s good to as a pastor, it’s good to find ways of expressing to our congregation how much we need them. I love hearing pastor Tj at the end of a Sunday morning saying how much he needed to be with the people of God that morning, because we’re fellow members.

Ray Ortlund
So Sam, looking at Romans 12, one through eight, I’m seeing two things that we pastors can do. We can cultivate a reverent awareness that we’re here by God’s grace, for God’s glory, and we’re not just available, we’re expendable. We’re all in with Christ. And the other thing is this grace given to us. It is a wonder of God’s grace. We’re not alone, we’re not isolated, we’re not God forsaken, we’re together, and on any given Sunday morning, we get to come together and bask in the wonder of His grace given to us. We don’t have to go to church. We get to go to church so many times. Okay, the truth of it is this so many times, Sam, I don’t really feel like going to church, but by the end of the service, I am so glad I came because being with God’s people, and I am individually a member with them, when I’m among them, I don’t know how it happens, life moves into me, and I kind of float out of church ready to face life as it is.