Romans 1:14-15

THE SPHERE OF SPIRITUAL SERVICE

‘I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise, … I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also.’

Romans 1:14

To whom was the Apostle sent? We are lost in wonder at his greatness. Natural prejudices, class prejudices, religious prejudices—all went down before him. He declares that his mission is to embrace not only his own people, but the outside nations, and not these only, but the most barbarous and uncultivated of them all; not only the cultured Greeks, but the untutored barbarians. The gospel which he preached was a gospel for every man, for every clime, for every class, the ignorant, for the rich and for the poor, for the privileged and for those who are altogether out of the way.

I. The love of God embraces all, and the Apostle’s heart of love went forth to all the world.—His mission was to every man. His object was to obey his Lord’s command—‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.’ And yet, while this catholic spirit pervades his utterance, his thoughts naturally, notwithstanding, centre upon Rome. Throughout this passage we can see how, again and again, he revolves the difficulties and responsibilities of his mission to Rome, and truly those difficulties were neither few nor small. For just as with us to-day there are, so to speak, many worlds, each separate from the other, the world of fashion, the world of art, the world of poverty and suffering, the world of sceptical doubt, and the world of religion—so it was at Rome; yet there, as here, all those subdivisions fell into two great divisions—Rome Christian and Rome antichristian.

II. Christian Rome.—Yes, there was, even when St. Paul wrote this Epistle, a Rome within a Rome, a Rome of which he could write that it was beloved of God, sanctified. Beloved with a love which dated from an ageless eternity—‘I have loved thee with an everlasting love’ (Jeremiah 31:3), a love which rejoiced over the most unworthy objects, over lost ones recovered even from the depths of the vice and iniquity which made Rome, in the language of its own historians, ‘the common sink and sewer’ of the world.

III. Antichristian Rome.—And then, on the other side, there was Rome antichristian. Rome, the mistress of the world, the mightiest city perhaps the world had ever seen, where, side by side, were found splendour and squalor, philosophy and filth, moral corruption and material magnificence, savage cruelty and effeminate luxury. Into this Rome, the shadow of whose darkness falls upon St. Paul’s canvas in the closing verses of the chapter like a funeral pall, the light of the gospel must penetrate, nay, had already penetrated; that little Church in Rome was a light shining in the darkness. How the heart of the Apostle went out to it, how he longed after them all with the ardent affection of the true missionary, though he had never yet seen their face in the flesh! Never repelled by uncongenial surroundings, never daunted by hindrances, his heart went out in love to all with whom he had to do. ‘So, as much as in me is,’ he says, in the fifteenth verse, ‘I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also.’ This, then, was the scope of the Apostle’s mission, it embraced the world, and its universality is one of the many proofs of its Divine origin.

—Rev. E. W. Moore.