Who are we?

[AI translation] On these unspecified Sundays, I would like to take out and explain, at least in excerpts, the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans. As for the letter itself, it is in this letter that Paul explains the essence of the Gospel of Jesus in the most complete and detailed way. The author is undoubtedly the Apostle Paul himself, who wrote and dictated this letter in Corinth in the year 59 AD. The Epistle to the Romans has always been held in high esteem in the Christian Church. Augustine was born again while reading this letter. Chrysostom read it twice a week. Luther said of it: 'This Epistle is the true chief of the New Testament, and the purest Gospel, worthy not only to be learned by the Christian man by heart, but to be lived by him daily as the daily bread of his soul'. There are many Bible readers today who love this part of Scripture, but perhaps even more who say it is a difficult read, difficult to understand. Well, indeed, it is difficult food, and that is why I would like to lighten the heavy content of the letter into a sermon, to make the heavy food easier to digest!Here is the introduction, which I have read out as the main theme of today's sermon. Among many other things, it answers the question of who we are. Yes: we who gather here week after week, we who believe in Jesus and want to follow him. We, the relatively few among the many, many other people. Because we are few. We are few in the world. 25-30 years ago, when there were only two billion people on this earth (I have no other figures), there were less than a third, 700 million Christians. The rest, the vast majority: non-Christians. These numbers have since shifted, to the detriment of the number of Christians. By the millennium, the world will have 6 billion inhabitants, and by then the proportions will have shifted even further, and there will be proportionally even fewer followers of Jesus. Perhaps we might even wonder how many of those 700 million - or perhaps only 300 million today - are truly Christ-followers? In the great crowd of people, it is a staggering few! More people flock to an international football match than all the Christian churches in Budapest on a Sunday! - So who are we, this handful of little people among so many? - Well, the way the apostle Paul describes himself and his readers here in the introduction to the letter to the Romans and in almost all his letters, tells us who we are.
The letter is addressed to a handful of Christians in Rome, a great Gentile city, whom the apostle calls "official saints!" More correctly, called, chosen saints of God! We can safely apply this particular definition to ourselves, since the letter is addressed to us just as it was to the Christians living in Rome at that time, and the present proportion of numbers is roughly the same as the proportion of numbers at that time. In the Middle Ages, the word 'saint' applied to a person meant a religious and moral quality in a certain sense, someone who was superior to others in many fine virtues, who had reached the highest degree of spiritual power, who had been purified by his faith almost to the point of sinlessness and perfection, in whom the Christian ideal of life was embodied. - Later on, especially after the Reformation, the word 'holy' took on a different meaning, saying that no son of man can be holy in the sense in which God is holy, that is, sinless, absolutely pure, but holy is the one whom God has called through Jesus and thus made, as it were, his own, reserved for himself. The former is too strict, the latter too mild an interpretation of the word holy. I think the real meaning of holiness is somewhere in between. Somehow that those who are truly, soberly and realistically holy, holy people, who by faith have come to know, love and embrace the Holy One, God communicating Himself in Jesus by His Holy Spirit! Who have become indebted to God for a lifetime for the mercy He has shown to their many lives of wickedness, who have been caught up by the power of forgiveness of sins for Jesus' sake and drawn into a life of fellowship with God. Thus, holy people in whose persons the Holy Presence, the Spirit of Jesus, is felt and experienced. Those saints in whom and through whom the Holy Spirit is at work.
Are such saints completely sinless? Unfortunately not! But neither do they resign themselves for a lifetime to the fact that they are not sinless, that they do not easily come to terms with their sins. Perhaps one of the greatest sins of Christians today is that they do not take the requirement of holiness of life deadly seriously, saying that being a saint is a high ideal that one never attains anyway, so I don't even aspire to it. We reassure ourselves that we are weak people, which is true, but is it not our greatest weakness, our sin, so to speak, that we do not strive to live a holy life to the fullest? Holiness is a vocation, that is what is meant by this Pauline expression: "official saints". I know that we do not sanctify ourselves, but that it is Jesus who works in us to make our lives truly holy. But am I ready to let Jesus shape me? Or do I myself object to an excessively holy life? Holiness does not consist in striving with all my strength to do as many good works and as varied a service as possible, but in striving to obey as fully as possible. It makes a difference how we proclaim the living Jesus: without words, and if necessary, with words! I have a male friend, a believing brother here in the church, who, when he looks at me, I can almost feel the gaze of Jesus on me. Under the influence of this loving, trusting, pure gaze, through which the inner holiness, the Jesus who lives in my heart, almost radiates: all lowly passions, bad thoughts and intentions almost dissolve like mist in the warmth of the sunshine. Behold, he proclaims the living Jesus, that is to say, he does apostolic work with his mere gaze.
Someone said the other day: How good that Jesus did not write down a single sentence. How strange it would be if someone went into a bookshop and asked for a good book on the truth, and the salesman pulled a book off the shelf and said, 'Here it is, entitled What is the Truth? Written by: Jesus Christ! That would be a total degradation of His holy person. It would be too human. For the person and teachings of Jesus are one. If he had written, it would have become doctrine. And now: life! A life who can only be proclaimed by life. Who, through the lives of those who believe in Him, radiates His living reality into the world today! You are the book, it is from you that Jesus is read, it is from you that Jesus is known. This is the apostle's task. This is what we are sent out to do among the Gentiles. May your sense of mission, your sense of walking in the mission of Jesus, give you strength and self-awareness! Whoever walks in the mission of Jesus is carried by the power and authority of Jesus. Don't be afraid to go to people as an ambassador of Jesus, saying to yourself often, wherever you are: 'The Lord has sent me'.
And finally, the Apostle Paul says something else about himself: 'Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ' (Romans 1,1). In fact, according to the original text: a slave. At that time, there was no subtle, reverential connotation to this word, in fact! Slaves were the sons of the conquered peoples. What Paul is trying to say is that Jesus conquered him completely. Thus he says on one occasion, "Christ Jesus has also taken hold of me" (Philippians 3:12). He did not take hold of Jesus, but Jesus took hold of him. As a friend of mine once said, when he was passionate about the cause of Jesus: "When I grabbed the flagpole, the flagpole pulled back and now it won't let go!". A slave is someone who is owned for life by his Lord. He can have it without limitation. For he has redeemed it, redeemed it from another slavery. He has no will, no purpose, no plan, no cause of his own: he is in the service of someone. However unpleasant it may sound, it is the most honourable title: slave of Jesus. Only one who has known Satan's slavery knows. To be the slave of a gracious, loving Lord is a good thing. Remember that old evangelistic hymn, "Make me your prisoner, Lord, and I shall be free"? He who is a slave of the Lord Most High is directly dependent on Him, and therefore free from the service of all kinds of second- and third-rate lords and princes. Enviable independence! Why, then, do we always shrink back, shrink back from serving Him? Can there be anything greater in this life than to be the slave of Jesus Christ?!
What are we then? Called saints, commissioned apostles, redeemed slaves! Would that we were truly so! For then, however few we are, we are worth being! That is what this world needs most today. These are the ones to whom Paul once said, "The created world longs for the appearance of the sons of God" (Romans 8:19).
If someone were to ask me: what do you want to be in this life? I would answer: saint of God, apostle of the Gospel, slave of Jesus! Nothing else. There can be no greater demand on anyone in this life! Because it is the most beautiful, most varied, most interesting, most rewarding, most blessed way of life on earth! It offers the greatest prospects for growth and development. And this perspective is open to all of us, because the way to it is not up, but down. As John the Baptist once said, "He [i.e. Jesus] must grow, but I must go down" (John 3:30).
Amen
Date: 1 May 1960.