“Now I don’t want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I often planned to come to you (but was prevented until now) in order that I might have a fruitful ministry among you, just as I have had among the rest of the Gentiles. I am obligated both to Greeks and barbarians, both to the wise and the foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When I get something in my mind a certain way, I struggle to think about it in any other terms. That makes me remarkably tenacious in pursuit of a goal, but it can also make me irritatingly stubborn and unable to easily shift away from one idea when it turns out to not work very well. Sometimes, though, the problem isn’t with the idea itself, but with the path I’m taking to get there and the timing of the whole thing. Paul was going in the direction God wanted him, but the timing wasn’t always right. His mission was clear, though, so he knew where he was going. Let’s finish off Paul’s greeting to the Roman church today, and join in his mission.

Sometimes it’s hard for us to imagine when we encounter someone who does something differently than we do because they don’t have access to the same resources as we do. It’s easy to look at Paul’s letters and wonder why on earth someone would write a letter like this. In the absence of the riches of communication options that we have around today (none of which improve our communication so much as they just enable more of it to happen badly), in Paul’s day, they were pretty much limited to letter writing. Sure, you could have a messenger relay a message in person, but the idea that a messenger was going to remember everything you wanted to say when you wanted to say a lot is pretty far fetched.

The result is that we get letters like we have here. Once we start doing something, we tend to keep doing it that way until we encounter a reason to do it a different way. Paul’s letters followed a form of letter writing that was common in his day. There was an introduction of the writer, a greeting, the message body, and concluding greetings. And if an author thought something was really important to convey, he repeated it. Repetition was their version of italicizing or highlighting or emboldening a particular part.

Well, this is the second time Paul has mentioned his strong desire to visit the church in Rome in the span of just a few verses. Paul really wanted to go to Rome. He had wanted to go to Rome for a long time. He had made plans to go there to visit and encourage and strengthen the church that had grown up there. It was the rare church in the Roman Empire that he didn’t plant. But so far, he had not been able to make that happen.

Sometimes we want to do things for God that God either doesn’t want us to do for Him, or that He doesn’t want us to do for Him yet. This can be a pretty hard wall to encounter. We pray about it. We ask God to remove it. We make plans for it to be brought down, but there it stands all the same. God seems resolute against our desire to do what we want even though what we want is to do something for Him. Our pleas and prayers seem to fall on deaf ears and it doesn’t appear to be making the slightest bit of difference that we consistently frame them out in Jesus’ name.

Like we talked about last week, all of our prayer requests should be understood to contain the caveat that God might say no. And if that happens, we have to have the proper grasp of God’s character, or we are most decidedly not going to be able to make any positive sense out of the apparent rejection. Most notably, we have to go into our times of prayer with the clear and firm understanding that God knows better than we do. He is smarter than we are. His plans are better than ours. His route for accomplishing the advancement of His kingdom is shorter and guaranteed to get to that end. He can see what we don’t, and understand what we can’t even begin to imagine.

If He says no or wait, that is the best answer we could hope for. If He were to simply give us whatever we want – even if we what we want is genuinely and selflessly about advancing His kingdom (that is pretty often not the case and we have instead merely convinced ourselves that it is) – we’re eventually not going to like the results. At all. Getting what we want when what we want doesn’t fall in line with His perfect will is fantastically likely to simply create a mess for us and for the people around us. If we get a no from God, we should thank Him for it. If we pray for a door to be opened, and it remains closed, we should praise His name for it.

Now, this doesn’t mean that we then immediately quit praying for something that is really resonating in our hearts, especially when our desire really is to do something for God. It simply could be that God’s wait is about growing our trust and devotion in Him. It could be that God is giving us the opportunity to strengthen our pursuit of Him. And by giving us a particular desire, like Paul’s desire to go to Rome, He is building in us the level of devotion that will be necessary to see the desires and plans He has placed in our hearts brought successfully into reality. God really does know best.

In this particular case, because God kept preventing Paul from being able to go to Rome when he wanted, we got this letter. Our receiving a no could be because while God doesn’t oppose our having the thing we are seeking, He wants us to do something in the season of waiting He is inviting us into that will bless someone else. When we can’t do what we want to do for God for some reason, this doesn’t mean that we settle back and do nothing. It means that we focus our attention instead on doing whatever it is we can do for God when and where we are. We patiently and passionately pursue Christ’s character in the midst of our present situation even if our present situation is not what we want it to be. This will redeem whatever time God has placed us in, and will enable us to find more joy and enjoyment in our present rather than leaving us wishing to be somewhere other than we are.

Paul did this. While he couldn’t get to Rome, he just kept proclaiming and advancing the Gospel faithfully wherever he happened to be. He preached the Gospel to everyone he encountered no matter where he was or who they were. He proclaimed God’s kingdom to the people he should have and the people he shouldn’t have. Whether they were high or low, rich or poor, wise or foolish, male or female, or anything else, he shared the love of God in Christ with them. He redeemed his time beautifully. Let us make sure we are doing the same.

God’s periods of waiting aren’t ever very much fun in the moment. But if we will trust that His plans really are for our good, that His timing is always perfect, and that we can still pursue a path of faithfulness to His call even if we aren’t right where we want to be, we’ll know the joy of advancing His kingdom no matter where we happen to be. Let’s do that together.