“The report of your obedience has reached everyone. Therefore I rejoice over you, but I want you to be wise about what is good, and yet innocent about what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you. Timothy, my coworker, and Lucius, Jason, and Sosipater, my fellow countrymen, greet you. I, Tertius, who wrote this letter, greet you in the Lord. Gaius, who is host to me and to the whole church, greets you. Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother Quartus greet you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What are you known for? Is it a particular habit? A personality trait? Your vocation? There are all kinds of things people wind up being known for. Not all of them, though, are good. The same thing goes for the church. Churches have reputations. Some are known to be contentious and unwelcoming. Some are just known for being large. Some are known because of all the effective kingdom-advancing work they do. Paul commends the church in Rome here for something they were known for. I’ve got to say: theirs isn’t bad. Let’s talk about it and what follows as the letter draws to a close with the next post.

How impressed are you with God? Are you overwhelmingly impressed to the point that you can barely fathom the depths and heights of His greatness? Does the very mention of His name fill you with at least a little bit of a heady mixture of awe and dread? Do you feel the need to drop to your knees in worship when you encounter Him in some way? Is your constant longing to be near Him? Or is He just sort of…meh?

You can say whatever you like here, but it’s your life that will ultimately bear out the truth. I’ll confess that while there are certainly times I feel the weight of His greatness and goodness pressing down on my very soul, there are more times that I don’t take Him nearly as seriously as He deserves. There are times when I treat Him as my own little pet genie who I can call out from His lamp on a whim and send Him back there when I’m finished with Him.

I say all of this because what we really think about God will impact in profound and significant ways our response to His commands. If He is great beyond measure and worth of our highest devotion, then we are going to be pretty inclined to do what He says. If He’s more of a convenience when we are in need but otherwise not such a big deal, we’ll treat His commands with a great deal less deference. We’ll make sure we get what we want before we’ll give much thought to what He has commanded.

Life, though, is found in our willingness to take Him at His word. When we refuse, regardless of the reason, we set ourselves up to walk a very different path that will lead us in a very different direction. When we take Him at His word and take seriously who He is, our path through this life will not automatically be made easier. In fact, in many ways, it will become harder. When we are known to the world as one who follows Jesus faithfully, the world is going to take its hatred for Jesus out on us because we are the closest convenient target. All of the writers of the New Testament as well as Jesus Himself guaranteed us of this. But easy and good are not the same thing. Easy and leading to life are not the same thing. And this harder path will lead us to life. Eternal life.

Yet what is the evidence that we are really taking this path? What is the evidence that we have truly put our faith in Jesus? The evidence is found in how we live. More specifically, the evidence is found in our obedience. If God really is who the Scriptures claim Him to be, then obedience is the only response that makes any sense. Yet while this life of obedience may not be honored or even really tolerated by the world, in God’s kingdom it is celebrated from the rooftops.

The believers in Rome were known for their obedience. “The report of your obedience has reached everyone,” Paul tells them. They had a reputation for doing what God said. Whatever it was that God in Christ had commanded His people to do, those were the things the believers in Rome endeavored to do. They surely didn’t do this perfectly, but they did it intentionally and consistently enough that they had gained a reputation for it. Would that the same could be said of us.

We should strive to be known as people who keep God’s commands. Let me be more specific: We should be known as people who keep God’s command. That’s singular. Because there’s really only one command for followers of Jesus to keep. This is the new command He gave His disciples – and through them, us – on the night before He died. We are to love one another after the pattern of His own love for us. That’s it. That’s the one command we are called to keep. All the other instructions we see across the rest of the New Testament are merely commentary on this one thing. They are all different ways to keep it. Love is the motivation behind our obedience, and love is the form our obedience takes.

The more we do this, the easier it will get; the better at doing it we will get. We will gradually come to know goodness extraordinarily well. We will become wise to the ways of goodness. Indeed, when you do something a lot, you start to gain a familiarity with it. You know its ins and outs. You learn just the right approaches to get the absolute most out of it as well as the pitfalls to avoid in order to stay on track with it.

Paul rejoiced over the obedience of the Roman, but he didn’t want them to stop just because he was happy with them. He wanted them to pursue this wisdom in obedience, this wisdom in goodness. “Therefore I rejoice over you, but I want you to be wise about what is good, and yet innocent about what is evil.” That last part doesn’t mean we should be naive about evil. We must have a strong understanding and awareness of what evil is, we should simply be totally unfamiliar with it.

Evil isn’t something we need to learn from experience. It is perfectly acceptable to learn about it in the abstract the way young children in the D.A.R.E. Program learn about the effects of drugs on a person’s health and life. They are not given samples of various illegal drugs so they can experience their effects on the body. That would be foolish and dangerous in the extreme. They are merely told about them and everyone with at least half a brain in their skull recognizes that is enough. We want them to be totally innocent of any actual exposure to illegal drugs. Our familiarity with evil should work the same way. We should be aware of it yet totally innocent about it.

None of this is easy here and now. It is not easy because of the presence of sin in our hearts and minds. It is not easy because we have an enemy who comes after us in all sorts of different ways with the goal in mind of throwing us off the track of the kingdom, of sidelining us in our faith so that we are ineffectual in our efforts to proclaim and advance God’s kingdom, of making sure we are not enjoying the life of Christ in any way, shape, or form. Yet we persevere in our efforts all the same because we know that Satan and the sin he uses against us will not last forever. Their end has already been guaranteed; their defeat is already secured. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you.”

In the end here before we talk about the actual end and Paul’s final blessing tomorrow, Paul offers the believers a few more greetings. These are from Timothy, Lucias, Jason, and Sosipater. They are from Gaius, Erastus, and Quartus. And they are from Tertius who actualy wrote the letter. No, that doesn’t mean Paul didn’t really write Romans. Tertius was simply Paul’s amanuensis. That is, he was Paul’s scribe. Paul didn’t actually physically write any of his letters. He used a scribe for that. What that says about Paul himself we don’t know. But it’s one of the fun facts that might come in handy the next time you play Bible Trivial Pursuit. And now tomorrow we’ll finally bring this journey to its conclusion about thirteen months after it started. Until then…