A Passion For The Lost Series

Sermon Brief

Date Written: May 31, 2012

Date Preached: Jun 03, 2012

Where Preached: OPBC (AM)

Sermon Details:

Sermon Title: A Passion for the Lost!

Sermon Text: Romans 9:1-5 [HCSB]

Introduction:

1With Christ as my witness, I speak with utter truthfulness. My conscience and the Holy Spirit confirm it. 2My heart is filled with bitter sorrow and unending grief 3for my people, my Jewish brothers and sisters. I would be willing to be forever cursed—cut off from Christ!—if that would save them. 4They are the people of Israel, chosen to be God’s adopted children. God revealed his glory to them. He made covenants with them and gave them his law. He gave them the privilege of worshiping him and receiving his wonderful promises. 5Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are their ancestors, and Christ himself was an Israelite as far as his human nature is concerned. And he is God, the one who rules over everything and is worthy of eternal praise! Amen.

Did you know that June 1st marks the beginning of a season we go thru every year… a season most of us dread like the plague, and that is Hurricane Season!

But did you know that even before the ‘official season’ began that we have already seen 2 officially named storms form in the Atlantic and Beryl made landfall this past week dumping tons of rain on the East coast.

Why do I mention this? Why would I talk about hurricane season when we are about to launch off into one of the most difficult books of the Bible in Romans 9?

Well, I believe the imagery is clear… there IS a problem! We face a problem in our weather each and every year at this time, some yrs it is more and others it is less, but it is a problem! The storms are coming… it is not IF they are coming but it’s when they are coming!

Today we begin a chapter in Romans where Paul leads out this chapter with the same outlook… his view is that THERE IS A PROBLEM here… that problem is the rejection of Christ by the Jewish nation!

Several Jews had surrendered to Christ and many more each day were coming to know Christ as Savior, but Paul was experiencing an overall REJECTION of Christ as Messiah from the Jewish community as a whole…

The religious leaders who were supposed to know so much about the Messiah… were rejecting Jesus as Messiah and Savior because He did not match what they had built up in their tradition as to what MESSIAH would look like and BE like…

To them Messiah was going to be an earthly victor who restored Israel to its former glory… but TRUE Messiah was NOT about restoring Israel to its former glory, but it was about restoring God’s creation to its created beginnings… to be intimately communing with God!

Messiah was and is about redeeming the WORLD to God, not a nation to its glorious past. So Paul is stating here that there IS a problem in their rejection of Jesus as Messiah!

Paul’s sentiment was a heart-felt compassion and a heart broken burning in knowing that his fellow Jews were rejecting Jesus as Messiah.

Paul knew their rejection would result in them being eternally lost and outside of God’s new covenant… they believed that they were secure in God’s covenant because they were Jewish by birth…

But as Jesus said in John 3… to be part of God’s kingdom, you must be born AGAIN… born of the Spirit of God! Jewish ancestry was did NOT and still DOES NOT guarantee God’s salvation! Salvation only comes through the one true Messiah, Jesus Christ!

They were resolved in the knowledge that God had formed a covenant with their forefathers and they believed that covenant was their saving grace…

But Jesus made it clear that the covenant of the Old Testament was not complete and that He had come to fulfill where it was lacking…

The original covenant of God was NOT ever meant to be a complete picture and solution for salvation… in fact it was meant to show just how futile humanity is when it comes to sin and sin nature!

The original covenant reveals humanity’s inability to measure up… BUT the new covenant in Jesus was the saving Grace to which Paul preached! Where the old covenant was inadequate, thru Jesus and the new covenant we can be made complete in Christ and fully acceptable to God!

We learned about this when Paul taught us about justification… being in a right standing before God! Outside of Christ we are NOT in right standing with God and therefore an enemy of God.

1With Christ as my witness, I speak with utter truthfulness. My conscience and the Holy Spirit confirm it.