“That is why I have been prevented many times from coming to you. But now I no longer have any work to do in these regions, and I have strongly desired for many years to come to you whenever I travel to Spain. For I hope to see you when I pass through and to be assisted by you for my journey there, once I have first enjoyed your company for a while. Right now I am traveling to Jerusalem to serve the saints, because Macedonia and Achaia were pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem. Yes, they were pleased, and indeed are indebted to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in their spiritual benefits, then they are obligated to minister to them in material needs. So when I have finished this and safely delivered the funds to them, I will visit you on the way to Spain. I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing  of Christ.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The Scriptures are often inspirational. They’re occasionally confusing. Sometimes they’re admittedly boring. Occasionally they’re unnerving. Every now and then, though, they’re just practical. Here as we draw near the end of Paul’s letter to the Roman church, he offers up a review of his travel plans. This is the kind of material we often just skip over because it doesn’t seem to have much practical relevance. But if every word of the Scriptures is God-breathed and intended to shape us to look more like Him, then this is too. Let’s take a look at what’s here to see what we can see.

One of the points about Romans we have made a handful of times along the way of our journey is that Paul had not visited the church before. This is the only letter we have from Paul to a church or individual whom he had not previously visited or even planted personally. As we said way back in the beginning, this is why Paul stays pretty generic throughout the letter. He does finally touch on a specific issue when he weighs in on whether or not it is morally appropriate to eat meat that had been obtained from a pagan sacrificial offering, but that’s it. Everything else was something he could have written to any church.

Here in v. 22 we see for the first time Paul explain the reason he had not visited them before. “That is why I have been prevented many times from coming to you.” What is why? To answer that we have to go back to what we talked about yesterday. In v. 20, Paul told them that his “aim is to preach the gospel where Christ has not been named, so that I will not build on someone else’s foundation.” In other words, somebody else planted the church in Rome. Somebody else had preached the Gospel there. Paul’s call and directive from God was to go to places where that wasn’t the case. So, even though he wanted to go visit them, he had thus far in his life and ministry been prevented.

But he had plans to fix that. He had done all the work he needed to do in Asia, so he was free to go somewhere else. “But now I no longer have any work to do in these regions, and I have strongly desired for many years to come to you whenever I travel to Spain. For I hope to see you when I pass through and to be assisted by you for my journey there, once I have first enjoyed your company for a while.”

There are a couple of interesting things here. First, the implication that Paul no longer had “any work to do in these regions” is an indication that the Gospel had been fully proclaimed in the territory where he had been working. Can you imagine being able to say that? You pick the region. Where is it that God has called you to proclaim the Gospel? Is it another country? Is it another state? Is it at a certain company? Your own town? The local school? A particular neighborhood? Where has God called you to make sure the name of Christ has been heard? How diligently are you working to make sure that happens? It may be that in spite of a desire to go somewhere else or do something else, you are being held in a certain place because God intends for you to do the work of proclaiming the Gospel right there. When your work there is finished, you will be freed to go somewhere else. If you want to be somewhere other than you are, try being more active in making sure everyone around you has heard the Gospel and see what doors open once you finish.

The other thing to note here is that even though Paul is finally going to get to visit Rome, it will only be on the way to somewhere else. The Gospel had not yet reached the ends of the earth as far as Paul understood that distinction. Spain was as far as the world went in his mind. He would have had no concept of lands beyond the sea. The Gospel had not yet been proclaimed in Spain, so Paul was working to head in that direction. Rome was on the way to Spain, so Paul was going to stop and see them. We know from the history of Paul’s journeys that Luke shares with us in Acts that Paul would indeed make it to Rome. In fact, he would die in Rome. It is not as clear whether he ever made it to Spain in spite of his goal to reach that distant shore.

One more bonus thing. Did you notice Paul’s implicit request for financial assistance on his next journey? He was going to Rome to meet them and encourage them, but he was also raising support. He worked to pay his own way, but he also actively invited believers in the places he visited to partner with him in his work so that had some skin in the game of seeing the Gospel proclaimed to the ends of the earth. Not everyone is in a place that they can physically go somewhere else to proclaim the Gospel. In fact, as we talked about Tuesday, most people aren’t there. But we can support the work of those who are called. That is an important ministry in and of itself.

The question of how Paul would actually get to Spain, much less Rome, doesn’t seem to be something Paul had all worked out just yet. He just knows that he plans to do it after he completes his current mission. He spells out what that is in the rest of the passage. “Right now I am traveling to Jerusalem to serve the saints, because Macedonia and Achaia were pleased to make a contribution for the poor among the saints in Jerusalem.” This is a reference to the offering Paul took up from the churches he planted and later visited in Asia. Specifically, the Philippian church and the Corinthian church gave to this offering. We see Paul talk about this in 2 Corinthians 8-9. He had received money from them, and he was taking it back to its intended recipients.

He was doing this with the right spirit and in obedience to the command of Christ, but he was also doing it against the counsel of pretty much everyone who loved him. Over and over again he was warned not to return to Jerusalem because his enemies there among the Jewish religious elite were planning on seeing him arrested and put to death just like they had done to Jesus. Sometimes the mission God calls us on is one that is going to end badly for us here and now. What’s more, we know it. So do the people around us. They’ll rightly warn us against taking that path because of their love for us, but if God has called us to it, we have to take it anyway, trusting that He’ll take care of us best in the end. As Paul would write to the Philippian church after he had made it to Rome under arrest, for us to live is Christ, but to die is gain. (We’ll explore that in a few weeks when we start a new journey together through Philippians…stay tuned.)

Speaking of this offering he had collected, Paul offers a quick note on its importance and appropriateness. “Yes, they were pleased, and indeed are indebted to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in their spiritual benefits, then they are obligated to minister to them in material needs.” All of the peoples Paul visited who had given their lives to Christ and were experiencing the spiritual fruits of the Gospel were able to do so because of the work of the saints in Jerusalem. The Gospel started there. It was only right then, that they show support in return. They didn’t need the support of hearing the Gospel, but rather of help in their time of physical need. So, that’s what Paul invited them to do.

Paul closes here by reasserting his intentions to come to Rome next. “So when I have finished this and safely delivered the funds to them, I will visit you on the way to Spain. I know that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.” Again, we don’t know for certain if Paul ever actually got to Spain, but he did for sure get to Rome. What’s interesting, though, is how he got there. When Paul arrived in Jerusalem, everything happened just as all the people along the way had warned him that it would. The Jewish leaders engineered a mob to attack him in hopes of lynching him. What they did not expect, though, was for Paul to claim on his Roman citizenship and demand the protection of the Roman Legion stationed there.

Knowing that he faced a grim end in Jerusalem – an end the Romans ruling there might help to hasten because he was obviously disrupting the peace of the city by his presence – Paul appealed to Caesar, something he was entitled to do because of his citizenship. This resulted in his getting the chance to proclaim the Gospel to the Roman Governor and King of the region. It also resulted in his trip to Rome at the Empire’s expense. When Paul declares his knowledge that he will come to the Roman believers “in the fullness of the blessing of Christ,” what he perhaps didn’t expect (or maybe he did given the rest of his experience so far in proclaiming the Gospel around the world) was the shape that blessing would take.

Paul knew God had a plan to get him to where He had directed him to go. He knew that plan was going to be good and result in the growth and spread of the Gospel. He simply didn’t know what the details of that plan would be. But he didn’t need to know. He knew that God would reveal things when it was necessary. As it turns out, from a human perspective, that plan was terrible. Paul was mobbed, arrested, shipwrecked, and finally put on trial before a crazy emperor. But along the way, dozens and dozens of Roman soldiers heard the Gospel. Roman leadership heard the Gospel. Roman prison guards heard the Gospel. He probably presented the Gospel to Nero himself if he indeed got his court date.

Sometimes – often even – what we think God’s plans should be and what God’s plans actually are turn out to be two totally different things. What’s more, from our limited perspective which is shaped mostly by our perception of our own convenience, God’s plans seem terrible. But if He really is God, and if we really are not, then His plans are always going to turn out better in the end, even if the path between now and then seems ill-fated to get us where we are trying to go. Paul could have resisted God’s leading and gone straight to Rome, but a whole lot of Gospel-advancing work wouldn’t have happened. And, without the Holy Spirit’s clearing the way, Paul’s work there in Rome would have been much less productive and effective than it actually turned out to be when Paul stayed on track with God’s plans, hard as they were.

Our journeys with Jesus are going to take all sorts of different shapes. Sometimes they’ll bend in about the ways we expect. Other times, they’ll take us places we could never have imagined. The road will occasionally be smooth and flat, but it will often turn rough and steep. Just because something is hard, even really hard, doesn’t mean we are out of sync with God’s plans for us. It just might mean we are exactly where He wants us to be. If we will trust Him and keep moving in His direction, following the path of Christ’s righteousness, He will get us where we are going. He will redeem all the hurt along the way. He will see His kingdom advanced in powerful ways through our lives. We only need to trust and obey. For there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, than to trust and obey. Amen.