Arming Myself With The Truth Series

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

› Engage

How many of you here this morning are not liars? Would you raise your hands?

I’m glad that no one raised your hand because if you did, you would be a liar. There is probably no accurate way to figure out how much people lie because in any kind of a study that was done people would just lie about the fact that they lie. But one study I ran across this week suggests that 60 percent of people can’t go 10 minutes without lying at least once. And for that 60 percent who did lie, they told an average of 3 lies in that short period of time.

So I guess it’s not surprising that there is no shortage of information on how to spot a lie. When I Googled “how to spot a lie” this week, my search returned roughly 186 million results. And, at least on the first few pages of results, the answers were pretty similar. Most focused on watching and listening to the person who was suspected of telling a lie and evaluating their voice and their body language.

› Tension

Lies and deceit are also a significant threat to the body of Christ and those who sow those lies often cause divisions an create obstacles that hinder people from becoming disciples of Jesus. But as we’re going to see this morning, there is a far more effective way of dealing with those lies other than focusing on the ones who are spreading them. And every one of us is both individually and corporately responsible for applying that principle.

› Truth

This morning we will wrap up - at least for now - our study of the book of Romans that began in the fall of 2014. I am convinced that this has been a really important journey for us as a church because it has helped us to firmly establish the crucial doctrines that provide the solid foundation for our faith as well as to consider how that doctrine ought to impact our day to day lives as disciples of Jesus.

So go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Romans 16 and follow along as I read beginning in verse 16.

Read Romans 16:17–23

We’ll come back and look at the last three verses of the chapter at the end of the service today.

Hopefully you’ll remember that in the first part of the chapter Paul sent personal greetings to a number of people that he knew there in the churches in Rome. And we developed this main idea from those verses:

The church consists of ordinary people doing extraordinary work in Christ

Then in verses 21-23 Paul lists a number of people who are with him in Corinth and who send their greetings to the churches in Rome along with Paul. Although it’s not the main idea we’re going to focus on this morning, this list of 8 of Paul’s co-laborers reminds us that ministry is always best accomplished by working together with others and not in isolation.

In between those two lists of people, Paul gives one last admonition to the churches in Rome. He warns them to guard against those who would sow lies and deceit in their midst and thus cause divisions and put up obstacles that would hinder people from becoming disciples of Jesus. Unfortunately, that is a warning that is still needed in the church today. In fact, I think it is probably even more of a problem today that in was in Paul’s day.

Paul briefly describes the motivations and the methods of those who would harm the church like that. Although I think there is some value in understanding why someone would do that and the methods they tend to employ, we’re not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about that this morning. That is because there is a better way to guard against those lies and we’re going to spend most of our time focusing on that.

First, we see the motives of those false teachers. Instead of being motivated by serving Jesus, they are motivated by their own appetites. Unfortunately today, we don’t have too look to hard to find those who are in ministry for their own profit or gain. They often ask for other people’s money so they can live lavish lifestyles. They love power and being the focus of other people’s attention. And in some cases they have even taken advantage of others to satisfy their physical desires.