The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): Are reputations important? Well, of course they are. The Bible talks about a church whose reputation was well-spoken of throughout the entire world. Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, featuring the Bible teaching of Dr. James Boice, teaching you to think and act biblically.

Today, we continue our new series in the book of Romans, part one, an introduction, by examining what kind of reputation is worth having. Do you fear what others might think of you if you begin living out your Christian beliefs in front of them? True, there will always be those who ridicule, but getting a reputation as a Christian will have value for you for all eternity. Let's turn now to Romans chapter 1 and see what kind of reputation is worth having.

Dr. James Boice: Turning today to the eighth verse of the first chapter of Romans, a verse which begins a second introduction to the letter. He now begins to talk in a very personal way about his aspirations and his relationship to the church at Rome to which he's writing. It’s interesting that he begins by giving thanks, thanks to God for them. And the thing for which he is particularly thankful is that their faith—not their piety or their good works or their giving or their missionary activity or some other nevertheless very worthwhile thing—but their faith is being spoken of throughout the whole world.

Here was a church that had a reputation for faith. And when we begin to think about that, we begin to think about reputation, and we ask, what kind of a reputation do we have? Do we have a good reputation? Do we have a bad reputation? Or for that matter, is reputation even a thing worth having? William Shakespeare often has very perceptive and beautiful statements about things like reputation, and he certainly does at this point, both negatively and positively.

For example, I think of the speech in "As You Like It" that’s given by that rather melancholy character, Lord Jacques. It’s a well-known speech; it has to do with the ages or stages of man. It begins, "All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players." He starts talking about man as an infant, and he progresses to man as an old man. In the middle of that, he talks about the soldier and how the soldier seeks, he says, "the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth." What he means by that, of course, is that worldly reputation is a fragile and generally a very worthless thing.

It's quite different in "Othello." Othello was also a soldier who acted foolishly and tragically, and after he’s done so, Othello says, "I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of me, sir, and what remains is bestial." You see, it raises the question: what kind of a reputation do we have? Are we seeking a reputation that is worthless, or do we have a reputation by the grace of God which is significant, even as the reputation of the Roman Christians for faith was significant?

Why do you suppose this was so important? Why did Paul thank God for it? Well, I want to suggest a number of reasons. And as we think about this, and as we think about the faith of this early church in this great capital of the Roman Empire, we want to be thinking about it in terms of our own faith, the faith of our own church, and our reputation. And we want to ask if we have a reputation like this and if our reputation is worthwhile.

Now, I ask the question, why was the reputation for faith that this early church in Rome had worth having? The first answer to that is that the faith they had was a true or genuine faith. It's worth saying that because there are many things in our day that pass for faith that aren't really worthwhile, that aren't genuine. We live in a day of cheap substitutes, and that’s true in religion as well as in other areas of our life. And there are cheap substitutes for faith.

One substitute for faith in our day is what we would call subjective religious feeling. We live in a touchy-feely age, and we apply that to religion. And we think, well, you have faith if you feel good or if you feel Christianly about something, whatever that may be. Some time ago, I was speaking in the suburbs to a Bible class, and after I had spoken, a young man came up to me and began to talk about some of the things I'd been teaching. I asked him if he was a Christian. He said, "Yes, I am."

And so we proceeded from there, and I discovered as we began to talk that he did not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ. He didn't believe that he died on the cross for us, for our sins, taking the punishment of those sins upon himself. He didn't believe that he rose bodily from the dead. He did not believe that Jesus is going to be the judge at the final judgment and that we’d have to answer to him. And when I spoke to him afterwards and said, "But I don't understand that. How can you claim to be a Christian when you deny what are obviously the cardinal doctrines of Christianity?"

He said to me, "Well, I don't know quite how to answer your question, but nevertheless, deep in my heart, I feel that I really am a Christian." Well, you see, it was just a subjective feeling. It’s not what the Bible means when it’s talking about faith. Another substitute for faith we have in our time is credulity—that is, wanting to believe something, wishful thinking. We see it in different areas, but we see it, for example, in the so-called faith of those who want to believe in a cure for some incurable disease—congenital heart failure, or cancer, or AIDS, or something like that.

And they say, "Well, you know, I have faith in this cure" or "I have faith that I'm going to be healed of it by whatever means this may be." But the problem with that, you see, is that wishful thinking doesn't produce the cure. It doesn't make it happen. Wishful thinking is not real faith; it's not genuine faith. There's a third substitute for faith in our day which Norman Vincent Peale popularized in his book "The Power of Positive Thinking." It's more or less just optimism or self-esteem.

Peale said, you know, the way to succeed in life is by thinking positively about things. So what you have to do is get up in the morning and first thing, before you eat breakfast or do anything else, look in the mirror and say to yourself, "I believe, I believe, I believe." He said what you want to do is go to the Bible, if you're a Christian person, and look up verses that have to do with faith—verses like, "If you have faith as small as a grain of mustard seed, you’ll be able to say to this mountain, 'remove and be cast into the sea,' and it shall be done unto you. Nothing is impossible to him who has faith."

Peale said, memorize verses like that, allow them to sink down into your subconscious, and then form your thinking so you really have a positive outlook on things. He said in that book, "According to your faith in yourself, according to your faith in your job, according to your faith in God, this far you will get and no further." And when he gets to the very end of the book, he says, "So believe and live successfully." Well, I'm sure it’s very good to have a positive self-image, if you deserve it. And it’s certainly good to have an optimistic outlook on life; at least it helps you get through the tough spots.

And all of that is very good worldly wisdom, but it is not biblical faith. You see, when Peale says, "According to your faith in yourself, according to your faith in your job, according to your faith in God," the very way that's written suggests that all of those things are more or less equal. And what that really says when you get down to the bottom line is that the object of faith doesn't matter. And that’s why at the end of the book it can say, "So believe." It doesn't tell us what to believe in or who to believe or what content faith should have; it just says believe.

You see, it doesn't matter. What it really is talking about is a positive outlook on life—optimism—and that is not biblical faith. If I may say so, a reputation for that sort of thing is not worth having, any more than a reputation for credulity or mere subjective feeling. So I come back to the question: why was this faith of the early Roman church faith worth having and a reputation worth having? And the answer is because it was a genuine faith. Why? First of all, because it was a faith in Jesus Christ and the gospel.

You can hardly miss that, can you, when you read these early verses of the letter? Because in the verses immediately before this, it is that gospel centered in Jesus Christ about which the Apostle Paul has been speaking. He begins in verse two with a reference to the gospel God promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures regarding his son, that is Jesus Christ. And he talks about his human nature and his divine nature. And after he gets through explaining something about the gospel in an introductory way, he says that it is through him, that is through Jesus, and for his name's sake that we have received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles—and we remember that the Roman church was a largely Gentile church—to the obedience that comes from faith.

And then immediately after that, he says, "I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you because your faith is being reported on in all the world." What faith was that? It was a faith in that Jesus. It was a faith in that gospel. It was a faith in his person and his work. And for that reason, it was genuine and it was a faith worth having. I want to suggest something else. Not only was it a faith in Jesus Christ, it was a faith that had been produced in the Roman Christians by God.

That is, God was the source of it. And because God was the source of it—God being the source of all good—it was a good thing. It was a valuable, important, essential thing for them to have. That's the way Paul writes the verse, after all. He says, "I thank my God for all of you." You see, if faith were something of which we're capable, if it were something that just wells up naturally out of the hearts of men and women, then to write this way would be inaccurate. Paul should not say, "I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you."

He should say, "I thank you." He should say something like, "Thank you for believing on Jesus. I’m so glad you did." Or "Thank you for your faith. That’s what we need in this world—more faith. We need people who have more faith, and it’s really good of you to have it." But you see, Paul knows better than that. He knows that we can't produce that in ourselves. Faith is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. God must first of all regenerate people before faith comes. And so he says what we would expect him to say, focusing glory on God: "I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you."

If I may say so, you see, that’s why this is a reputation worth having. That’s why we should desire this kind of a reputation. If we were desiring a reputation for what we are or what we had accomplished, it would be an inglorious thing. We shouldn't do that. But if faith is something that God produces, if he’s the source of it and he’s the one who sustains it, then to be known for our faith is to be known for something that God is doing, and the glory goes to God as it should. So I say, this is a reputation worth having, and the first reason for that is that the faith that they had a reputation for was genuine.

Now, secondly, I want you to see that it is a contagious faith. That is, it wasn't only the real thing; it was something that was spreading, and spreading rapidly throughout the Roman world. In the 17th verse, there is a phrase which I think suggests this, though I only say suggest it because it's possible of at least two different translations. In the Greek text, the words are literally "from faith to faith"—*ek pisteōs eis pistin*—from faith to faith. Now, it's possible to translate that the way the New International Version translators do—that is, they paraphrase it somewhat; they assume a phrase like that means, as they say, "faith from first to last."

And that may well be. But the literal reading of the words "from faith to faith" suggests, and I think that this is the correct translation, from the faith of one who knows Jesus Christ and talks about him to another who responds in faith as a result of the first Christian's testimony. Now, as I say, I’m not absolutely certain that that's what this text means, but I am certain that that's the way the faith of the early Christians spread throughout the Roman world.

Because you see, they didn't have all the modern means of communication that we do. They couldn't use Madison Avenue techniques for communicating the gospel. They didn't have tracts and newsletters and books and radio and television and mass mail campaigns and all of those things. And yet, as Paul says here quite clearly, he'd never been to Rome, but he himself had heard of the faith, and he said, "Everywhere I go, people are talking about the faith of these Christians in Rome." Well, how did it happen? How did it spread?

It just spread because it was genuine, and because one Christian who is genuinely alive in Christ spoke to someone else who is dead in trespasses and sins. We know that in the first generation of the church—that is, within 30 or 40 years from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—the gospel had literally spread throughout the Roman Empire and beyond it, even to India and to the shores of China, according to the judgment of Gibbon, the great Roman historian.

Well, there's a third thing about this faith and reputation of the early Roman church, and that is that it encouraged other people. It certainly encouraged Paul. He says here in verse 12 that he was looking forward to the day when he would get to Rome—he hadn't gotten there yet—but he’s looking forward to the day when he would get there, "that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith." Now, as he wrote that, it was future. He hoped for that kind of mutually encouraging exchange.

The reason why Paul could anticipate that in such confidence, I am sure, is that he had already been greatly encouraged as he’d heard what God was doing there among the Roman Christians. You say to yourself, did the Apostle Paul need encouragement? We can be sure he did. Oh, he was an apostle. He was a man of strong faith. He had the kind of character that God had given him that could keep him going in the midst of all kinds of hardships. And I guess even if he hadn't been a Christian, he would have hung in there in some other place or some other service.

But he was a Christian, and he plugged away, and yet nevertheless, perhaps especially as a Christian because he was engaged in a spiritual warfare, nevertheless the Apostle Paul needed encouragement. You know, he writes about some of the things he went through to the Christians in Corinth. He says in his first letter, early on, second chapter about verse three, that when he was with them, he said, "You know that I wasn't there with winsome speech or powerful arguments, but I was there in fear and in much trembling."

And in the second letter, when he writes about his experiences, he said, "Ours isn’t an easy life. We’re cast down but not destroyed. We’re persecuted but not cast out." And he goes down a whole long list of these things. And toward the end of the same letter, he says as he lists all of the persecutions he had suffered and the stonings and the hardships and the shipwreck and all of that, he says, "In addition to all these things, I have the burden of the constant care of the churches." And yet he says, "These things have happened to us in order that the gospel might spread and there might be cause for thanksgiving to almighty God."

I am sure that the Apostle Paul, when he heard that the Christians in Ephesus were doing well, and the Christians in Philippi were doing well, and the church was well-established in Corinth and in Thessalonica and all these other cities and in Rome—when he heard that these things were happening, the Apostle Paul said, "You know, there may be times when I get down; there may be times when I'm so discouraged I wonder if I can keep going. But when I hear of that, I know that it's worthwhile because God’s building his church." And that's what we're in this for.

I think, too, because this is what distinguishes this particular report, that Paul was particularly encouraged because this was happening in a church in which he personally had not been involved. You say, how can that be? I think I understand very well how that can be because I react that way myself. I'm very glad, as I'm sure you would be yourself when you hear that something you have said has been a blessing to someone else. And when I get letters, as I often do, particularly through the ministry of The Bible Study Hour, that say that this individual has become a Christian through this broadcast or this particular message strengthened a person at this particular time in his or her life, I find that very encouraging.

That helps me work at it harder and so on. All that’s very good. But let me say personally, the thing that encourages me most is not what I hear that God is doing as a result of my ministry, but what I hear he's doing elsewhere as a result of the ministry of someone else. You say, well, why should that be? Simply because it means that I’m not alone in the work. I’m not the only soldier in the fight. It means that God is building his church, and therefore you take great confidence at what God has done.

Don't you find that to be true? Aren't you encouraged when you hear what God is doing elsewhere in other Christians? When I hear about the Christian churches in Romania that are strong and thriving in spite of the oppression—often cruel beatings by the Communist government—I am encouraged in that. I say God is building his church behind the Iron Curtain. When I hear reports of the courageous stand that Christians are taking in South Africa against apartheid, even in great danger—danger of their lives, and many are being killed for their stand—I take encouragement from that.

I say we still have martyrs today. We have people that have the character of Latimer and Ridley and Wycliffe and Huss and others who died in the Reformation period. When I hear of Christians that are working in the cities in danger and in difficult circumstances, I'm encouraged by that. Just this week, Melvin Floyd was here. He spoke to our high school students in City Center Academy. He told about his work, and it was a great joy, great blessing. It was a great assembly.

I'm encouraged by that. I say, there's a man who comes out of the city, that God has saved and is using in the city. When I hear about Christians in government, I’m encouraged. I hear that in the halls of Congress and in the offices of the senators of our country, small groups—dozens and dozens of them—meet regularly for Bible study and prayer. And these leaders of our country seek for wisdom from God in order to lead the affairs of the United States of America aright. I find that very encouraging. I say God is at work; that is marvelous. Above all, I rejoice whenever I hear that somebody comes to faith in Jesus Christ. Even in the heavens, the angels rejoice over one sinner who repents.

Well, as I say, that encouraged Paul. And for that reason, as well as for the others, this was a reputation worth having. There’s one last point, and that is that not only was this faith a genuine faith and a contagious faith and an encouraging faith, this reputation was also worth having because, in the final analysis, faith is the really essential thing—the only essential thing. Oh, it's true that we value knowledge. Christianity puts a great store...