Humility (Romans 12:3)
INTRODUCTION:
Last week we began chapter 12 of Romans and as I said this begins a new section. In the first 11 chapters of Romans Paul gave us the doctrine of salvation, teaching us what the believer receives from God through His mercy and grace, what we are saved from and what we are saved to. In chapter 12 and through the rest of the book of Romans Paul now makes that doctrine practical, how do we live this new life that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ. In the first two verses that we looked at last week Paul gave us our response as believers in relation to God. Our response is to present our bodies as a living and holy sacrifice to God, to surrender our will to His will as our spiritual service of worship and allow the Holy Spirit through the Word of God to transform us by the renewing of our minds. This is where we are to begin when we speak of living out our salvation on this earth, being useful for the Savior begins with abandoning all we are to Him and as we are transformed we are able to prove or discern what God’s will is for us, His will that is good for us, that is acceptable or well-pleasing for us, that is perfect and complete for us, it will be a perfect fit for each person. There is no better place to be then in the center of God’s will for your life, it brings your life into balance.
This morning beginning in verse 3 Paul begins to talk about our walk of faith in relation to other people and first he speaks of it in relation to other believers. Paul is going to build upon what he taught us in the first two verses of this chapter, when we have surrendered all that we are to God, the worship that God wants, and the transformation begins through the Spirit renewing our mind with the Word of God, God can then take our life and use it for His glory. And as we begin to look at our usefulness to God in relation to other people, we are going to learn that that usefulness depends on a number of things, we will look at one this morning. First, it depends on a proper attitude, how we think of ourselves in relation to other believers. Beginning next week, we will look at proper relationship, how we relate and are connected to each other. Then we will see that our usefulness depends on proper service, how we are different from others and why. Before turning to our Scripture let’s pray and ask for God’s blessing and that He would teach us by His Holy Spirit.
SCRIPTURE:
Turn in your Bible to Romans 12. I will only be looking at verse 3 this morning, but I want to read verses 1-8 to pick up the context of the passage we are in. Please, if you are able, stand in honor of the reading of God’s Word written to you and me.
Romans 12:1-8,
“Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to exercise them accordingly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching; or he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.” (Romans 12:1–8, NASB95)[1]
PROPER WORSHIP (Romans 12:1-2)
Last week we saw as Paul came alongside us and encouraged and urged us to genuinely worship God as God desires us to worship Him. As we learned this worship comes from within us, from our soul welling up and bursting forth from an understanding, a knowledge of the mercies of God and the result of this knowledge is to surrender or completely abandon all that we are to God’s will as a living and holy sacrifice. When we understand the mercies of God granted to us in salvation, those mercies of God that are ours through the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ, when we fully grasp the magnitude of the cross and what took place there, and the power of the resurrection and what that means for us, when we understand the sacrifice and surrender of the Lord Jesus Christ to the predetermined will of God the Father, our response will be worship, praise to God for His mercies through a total surrendering to His will.
When we as believers come to Romans 12:1-2 we are all at the same place; this is the first obligation of every believer before God, the same obligation for you and for me. God wants our life, our whole life, and when we surrender it to Him this is our entrance into usefulness. It is at this point of worship that we begin to be used by God. This is the order as it has always been, first worship, then service. As we come to verses 3-5 it is important to understand that that although we come to this place of commitment the same, and God sends us out with a shared and unified mission, to serve Him, but He equips us for that service to Him with great diversity. There are no two Christians alike. We are diverse in terms of our service and we are diverse in terms of our own personal identity and personality. This being said, no two of us can serve the Lord in the same way. John MacArthur put it this way, “So the primary focus of these verses (3-5) is to demonstrate to us that though we all enter the place of usefulness with the same utter and total self-sacrifice and in that there is complete uniformity, from there on is great diversity…And that’s what the Apostle Paul wants to emphasize. There can be no genuinely effective service, genuinely reciprocated service, that is service in which we are blessed, unless we first offer ourselves as a living sacrifice…It is greatly practical because the intention of offering myself to God is so that I may become immediately useful to Him, that’s the point.”[2] This is not an either/or proposition. To have effective God-blessed service, there must be godly commitment. Serving God has meaning and comes with blessing only when it is the outflow of total commitment to Him and His will.
Does this mean that results can only happen when these two are combined together? No, God can produce results even when we serve out of selfish reasons instead of sacrificially, but that is only because the truth is so much more powerful than us. God can use you even in the midst of non-commitment if you speak the truth because the truth is so much more powerful than your ability to limit it, but you will not receive the benefit, you will not be blessed and you will limit what could be done. The message of the Gospel is so powerful God can get it through a clogged vessel but think of the blessing and the result when the vessel is clean. There have been times in my own life when I have tried to serve God in pride, I have taught the Word of God in my own strength and God used it because His Word never returns void, but so much more would have been accomplished if it were done with right motives because my life was fully surrendered to God. All of this by way of introduction, now let’s look at verse three, we are useful when we have the proper attitude.
The Apostle begins verse 3 by saying, “For through the grace given to me…” (Romans 12:3a, NASB95)[3] This is a beautiful statement because Paul is about to tell us that the proper attitude is humility. So, Paul begins this way. What is this “grace given to Paul” that he is talking about? It is not saving grace, although He did experience that grace, all believers experience saving grace at the moment they put their faith in Jesus Christ. Paul is speaking about the grace of God specifically in being called to be an apostle. All that we have and do that is worthwhile from salvation to serving the Lord is the grace that is given to have or do those things. It was the grace of God that ordained Paul to a position of authority, the position of an apostle. This is not the first time that Paul has spoken of the grace of God that brought him into this position. In Ephesians 3 Paul is speaking of the ministry given to him by God, that it is by God’s grace that he is an apostle, he writes in Ephesians 3:7-8 that the gospel, “of which I was made a minister, according to the gift of God’s grace which was given to me according to the working of His power. To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ,” (Ephesians 3:7–8, NASB95)[4] God’s grace became for Paul the power and equipment that he needed to minister as an apostle to the Gentiles, to preach to them the unfathomable riches of Christ. He had received a call to go and preach, Jesus Christ confronted him and called him into ministry. He was an apostle by the grace of God. Why didn’t he just say that with the authority as an apostle of Jesus Christ I say to you? Because when you are about to speak on humility you don’t pull rank. What Paul is really saying is as an apostle I have authority to tell you this, but I want you to know that my authority as an apostle has nothing to do with me, it has everything to do with God’s grace. That is what Paul said to Timothy in 1 Timothy 1:12-14, “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has strengthened me, because He considered me faithful, putting me into service, even though I was formerly a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent aggressor. Yet I was shown mercy because I acted ignorantly in unbelief; and the grace of our Lord was more than abundant, with the faith and love which are found in Christ Jesus.” (1 Timothy 1:12–14, NASB95)[5] So by appealing to the grace of God given to him Paul shows humility even in the way he refers to his apostleship. Understanding this, what Paul has to say is authoritative because he is an apostle sent to us with a message from God. He writes, “For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith.” (Romans 12:3, NASB95)[6] First, notice that what Paul says is to everyone among you, no one gets off the hook. What Paul is saying is that this is for all believers, no matter who you are or what you do. He is speaking to me as well as you. He tells us to not think more highly of ourselves then we ought. This is an amazing statement and unfortunately, we lose a lot of its meaning in English. In the Greek Paul uses forms of the verb “to think” four times. He does this to get his point across. It might be translated like this, I say to everyone among you, do not think of yourself more highly then you ought to think, but to think with sober thinking. My version translates “sober thinking” as “sound judgment.” This form of “to think” translated “sober thinking” means to be in one’s right mind. Conceit and pride are treated as a form of insanity. If you do not think of yourself in the way you ought to think, with sober thinking, you are insane. Paul is really talking about humility as the proper attitude and humility is born out of a life fully surrendered to God. Understand that sober thinking or sound judgment means that we do not think to highly of ourselves, but it also means that we do not think to lowly of ourselves either. Often people define humility being someone who is weak, quiet, out of the way, in the background, almost invisible, someone who hardly says anything. That is not the picture that Paul gives us, according to him humility is not over estimation, but neither is it under estimation, rather it is right estimation. It is being able to say, “yes, I have been gifted by God, praise God, that in His grace He has given me a way to serve Him to His glory.” “I see that God has gifted you and, in His grace, has given you a way to serve Him to His glory.” Paul was not afraid to say that he was an apostle of Jesus Christ by His grace. I am not afraid to say that God has gifted me in communicating His Word by His grace. Not because of any of my own doing or because I deserve it or earned it, but simply by His grace God has gifted me this way. We must recognize that we are all gifted differently and deal with that in honesty, without pride and without false humility because all gifting is by God’s grace as He sovereignly chooses.
Paul goes on in the end of verse 3 to tell us how we rightly recognize our gift. We must recognize our gift as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. No matter what your gift is God is the One who has given it to you, and you are perfectly suited to it. Literally this phrase in the end of verse three is, “who God measured out the measure of faith.” This is something we must come to understand, your gift is given to you sovereignly by God through the Spirit. The first thing we should learn from this is that we should not be seeking after a gift because God is the One who gives out gifts and measures them out according to His own sovereign will. Paul said it this way to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 12:4-7, “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are varieties of ministries, and the same Lord. There are varieties of effects, but the same God who works all things in all persons. But to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” (1 Corinthians 12:4–7, NASB95)[7] He goes on in that same chapter and says in verse 11, “But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually just as He wills.” (1 Corinthians 12:11, NASB95)[8] God is the One who chooses which gift we receive and it will be the one exactly suited to us, we need not be proud about this, nor envious of someone else’s gift because all gifts are given by God’s grace. Second, we learn if the Lord is the One who has given these gifts to each of us, then no gift should go unused, no gift should be unused because they were given by God for His own glory, for the purpose of advancing His kingdom, for the building up of the church, to bring praise and glory to His name.
What exactly is this measure of faith that God measures out to us? It is the kind and quantity of faith needed to carry out our gifting. It is different for each person; it is uniquely measured out by God to each person, and it is the perfect amount. Look at what you desire, what your passion is and in that I’m sure you will find your gift. Using myself as an example, my passion is to know and understand God’s Word and to communicate that knowledge to others. In that passion God has measured out to me the measure of faith that I need to carry out this passion by which God has gifted me. God does not gift us and then leave us to figure it out or do it on our own, but with the gifting He also measures out to you the faith to carry out your gifting. The beginning of usefulness is an attitude of humility, realizing that each of us are gifted by God uniquely and given the measure of faith to carry out that gift.
CONCLUSION:
I am going to stop here this morning, I only got through one verse. We will pick back up here next Sunday and do some more of this section of Scripture. Paul in this chapter moves from doctrine to practical, how do we live out this salvation that we received by God’s mercy and grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. There are several things that we can do to live out our salvation and bring glory to God. We have looked at two so far. The first thing is proper worship that comes from an understanding of the mercies of God. This proper worship is in response to God’s mercies and it is presenting our bodies as a living and holy sacrifice to God. This is proper worship when we surrender all that we are to God so that we can walk in His will for us and we can be useful to Him. The second thing is a proper attitude, an attitude of humility when we look at how God has gifted us to serve Him and as we look at others and how God has gifted them. We must have a right estimation of ourselves so that we do not become prideful or boastful about our gift, because then we have crawled down off the altar and we need to go and present ourselves again as a living and holy sacrifice. We must realize that God has gifted us all differently and that diversity is necessary for the church to function properly, everyone’s gift is important for the purpose of advancing God’s kingdom, for the building up of the church, and most importantly for praising and glorifying the name of our God. Never downplay your gift or someone else’s, never exalt your gift or someone else’s because they are all important and uniquely given with the measure of faith needed to carry out your gift to the glory of God.
[1]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[2]MacArthur, John, Ministry of Spiritual Gifts, Part 1. Grace to You, Code 45-90, 2013.
[3]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[4]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[5]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[6]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[7]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.
[8]New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update. La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995.