Reverend Jonathan Waits
Beautiful Feet (Romans 10:1-17)
July 6, 2025
Have you ever washed a bottle with a small opening? I’ll admit: I hate doing that. You can use a bottle brush, and those are moderately effective, but I find the best approach is to squirt some soap down into them, fill them a bit, and then shake the mixture up really, really well. As long as the bottle isn’t just completely filthy on the inside, that usually does the trick. The only problem with this method is that you have to rinse it really thoroughly or else the next person who uses it gets a mouthful of soap. You can accomplish this in one of two ways. You can carefully run water down the side of the bottle, shake it up with the clean water, dump it out, and do it again. And again. And again. Until after about 100 repeats the bottle is ready to go. The second approach is a whole lot more wasteful, but also more effective. And faster. You just hold the bottle under the tap, turn it on full, and let the clean water run into the bottle until the water coming out of the bottle is clean.
Do you have that image in mind now? Let me pull back the curtain for you a little bit this morning on some of the behind the scenes parts of pastoring that don’t get talked about very often. Pastoring can be a little like pouring clean water into dirty bottles in order to get them clean. Now, that’s not to say that pastors are the source of the clean water. We’re not. At all. The Scriptures and God’s Spirit rightly bear that distinction. But we do get the job of being the ones who pour the water out. This is something that anyone can do, of course. Jesus called everyone to make disciples by teaching the word of God, but pastors tend to do it a little more often than most if for no other reason than that it’s our vocation.
All of that said, one of the bits of clean water God really impressed upon my heart and which I have been pouring out into this congregation for a while now is our threefold approach to growing our faith. If you want to grow your faith, you need to do three things: Engage regularly and consistently with God through the Scriptures, through prayer, and through the church. There is much more that goes into a growing and vibrant faith including serving both in the church and out in the community and world beyond even that as God leads. But if you start with those three things, growth will be the result.
Well, I’ve been pouring that out for long enough that it’s starting to come back out of the congregation. More and more often I hear you guys quoting it back to me. That’s a very good thing. Personally, it’s an encouraging one. Much more than that, though, I can see the growth from your efforts to put it into practice. Just look around and consider what we have seen and heard together the last few months. Think about all the ways we are seeing God move in our midst. That’s not because of anything I’m doing. It’s because of what you are allowing God’s Spirit to do through you as you pursue the growth of your faith.
Still, it’s easy for preachers to stand up front here and tell you what you should be doing. I’m not interested in being that kind of a preacher, though. So, this morning as an exercise in solidarity, I want you to see that just like you, I am striving to keep this threefold discipline active in my own life too. In my personal study time, I have been reading and praying through Paul’s letter to the Roman believers since January. Although I’ve only written through chapter 8 on my blog, I’ve studied through as far as chapter 10. And since we are on a rare unscheduled week, I thought I’d take a few minutes to share with you what I am learning right now in my own Bible study time.
Without further ado, then, if you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way with me to Romans 10. What Paul writes here is pretty incredible. If you’ll indulge me, we’re just going to walk through a bit of what he has to say this morning.
Now, as a bit of context, the letter Paul wrote to the Roman believers is the clearest, most comprehensive explanation and exploration of the Gospel you’ll find anywhere in the New Testament. In the theology-heavy first part of the letter, Paul starts with sin, moves to grace, explains how grace through faith overcomes sin, talks about our struggle against sin, and lands with emphasis on the wonders of what God has planned for us in Christ along with a celebration of His incredible faithfulness. Starting in Romans 12, Paul shifts gears to an exploration of some of the practical implications and applications of the Gospel message beginning with a powerful call to consider our lives to be living sacrifices to God in light of all He has done for us in Christ. The beginning and ending of the letter aren’t easy, but we do fairly well understand what to do with them.
The middle three chapters 9, 10, and 11, however, are a bit trickier. Here, Paul offers an extended reflection on the relationship of God with the Jewish people, how as a people they had largely rejected the Gospel, and how God’s plans weren’t at all derailed by this. Instead, He continued forward with those who were willing to be faithful to Him, and to receive what He wanted to give in Christ. Starting in chapter 10 here, after expressing his bitter regret that the Jews as a people had rejected the Gospel and God’s offer of salvation, Paul does a short deep dive on how exactly salvation works, who it is for, and what that means for those who have already received it.
Check this out with me starting at Romans 10:1: ‘Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God concerning them is for their salvation.” Paul took no joy in the Jews’ rejection of the Gospel in spite of how badly they treated him. In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul details some of the abuse he received for his efforts to advance the Gospel. It’s not a short list, and most of it came at the hands of Paul’s Jewish opponents. But still, he loved his people so much that he wanted to see them saved. Do you have a people you love so much that you are more committed to their salvation than you are to your own comfort and safety? That’s worth some thought. If you’ve got kids, my guess is that they sit pretty firmly on that list, but do you have anyone beyond them? Maybe that could be a point of prayer—that God would give you a burden for a people that doesn’t know Him.
Speaking of not knowing God, according to Paul, the Jews’ rejection of the Gospel did not come because they somehow lacked passion for God. “I can testify about them that they have zeal for God,” he says. Passion wasn’t their problem. Knowledge was. “I can testify about them that they have zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.” For all their passion for God, they didn’t really know who He was. They didn’t really understand how salvation worked. They didn’t really understand God’s righteousness and how it works.
“Since they are ignorant of the righteousness of God and attempted to establish their own righteousness, they have not submitted to God’s righteousness.” They thought righteousness—that is, being rightly related to God and to people—was something they could achieve on their own. If they just worked hard enough, using the Law of Moses as their guide, they could make themselves fit for God. That wasn’t a bad desire. It was simply wrongheaded. It was ignorant. It was pointed in the wrong direction. If the fulfillment of the Law was their goal, they didn’t need to be looking down and in, they needed to be looking up and out. “For Christ is the end [that is, the goal, or the fulfillment, or the thing toward which it was always pointing] of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”
The whole reason God sent Jesus was because we weren’t able to fulfill the Law on our own and needed help. Jesus did it for us, and invites us to take part in His fulfillment when we put our faith in Him. If we could keep the Law, that would be one thing. It would indeed bring us to righteousness. Moses made this clear when he was giving the Law in the first place. “…since Moses writes about the righteousness that is from the law: ‘The one who does these things will live by them.’”
The problem, of course, is that we never did manage to actually live by them. At least, not on our own. God tried to make it as easy as He could. He actually did even better than that. He laid the foundations for the Gospel in the Law itself, while it was still being given. Quoting now from three subsequent verses from Deuteronomy 30, Paul goes on next to show how God’s intentions for righteousness to be a gift of faith and not an achievement of effort were baked into the cake from the beginning. Look at this starting in v. 6 now: “But the righteousness that comes from faith speaks like this: ‘Do not say in your heart, “Who will go up to heaven?” that is, to bring Christ down or, ‘Who will go down into the abyss?’ that is to bring Christ up from the dead. On the contrary, what does it say? ‘The message is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.’”
In other words and again, our effort was never the key to obtaining God’s righteousness. Epic journeys even up into Heaven or down into the pits of Hell were never going to let us lay our hands on it. Instead, God put what we were going to need inside us, in our mouth and in our heart. And this wasn’t Paul saying that. It was Moses saying that to the people of Israel toward the end of his farewell address that is Deuteronomy. Paul quotes Moses to make the point that God wasn’t doing anything new or unexpected in revealing the Gospel to us and salvation in Christ. Paul himself wasn’t just making up doctrine from out of left field. He was proclaiming something that was absolutely consistent with what God had always been saying and doing.
“This is the message of faith that we proclaim: If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ [that’s the part God said through Moses about the message being in our mouth] and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead [and that’s the part about the message being in our heart], you will be saved.” Think about that. How many times have we tried to make salvation complicated? How many times have we tried to add this or that to it to make it feel like something we can accomplish by our own effort? How many times have we fallen prey to a new form of the very same ignorance about God that caused the Jewish people in Paul’s day to reject Jesus and the Gospel of salvation by faith alone?
Yet what does Paul say here? Salvation is simple. It is so very simple. “One believes,” which means to allow yourself to become convinced of the truthfulness of a particular proposition to such a degree that it affects your thinking and doing. “One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness…” That is, righteousness—the righteousness of God—comes by faith. It comes by belief. It is contingent on our believing the right things. And what is it we are believing? Well, what did Paul just say? That God raised Jesus from the dead. We accept the truthfulness of the proposition that God raised Jesus from the dead just as the Scriptures proclaim and all of its attendant implications. When we do that, God graciously extends the righteousness won by Christ in His life and through His death to us such that we become covered by God’s righteousness. The theological term for this is that God imputes His righteousness to us in Christ.
That’s the first part of the salvation equation. What’s the other? “One believes with the heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation.” Once we believe what is true about the world and human history and God’s character and plans, we simply acknowledge it. Verbally. That is, publicly. We commit ourselves publicly to our beliefs. The idea of saying something out loud is that someone else has heard it. There’s a kind of built-in accountability to this. This is part of why (in addition to Jesus’ command) so many churches, and especially Baptist churches, practice baptism as part of their membership process. The very public nature of baptism invites a certain amount of accountability. It is intensely public. It helps to hold us to the lifestyle of a person who has received salvation.
Now, is this whole thing a little scary sounding? It sure can be. I mean, to commit yourself heart, soul, mind, and strength to an entirely new worldview is a big deal. To finally accept that you aren’t good enough to save yourself and that you never will be is no small matter. To take up the mantle of Christ in light of everything He said would come part and parcel with that—all the persecution, the prejudice, the pressure to return to what was, the hatred, the willful ignorance and misunderstanding of who you are now, the potential rejection by friends and family, the fact that it will put a cultural bullseye on your back especially in our increasingly post-Christian culture, and so on and so forth—is serious business. But no one who has ever truly done it has ever regretted it. “For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes on him will not be put to shame.” This foundation is never going to crumble and fall out from underneath you leaving all your critics laughing about how they were right all along. It’s more than enough to hold you firmly in place if you are willing to lean on it. This is the best decision you will ever make, and nothing will ever make it anything less than that.
What’s more, this is something that is for everybody. Don’t miss this now because this may be Paul’s most important point in this whole sequence. No one who rests the theological and spiritual weight of their lives on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and His eternal lordship is going to be put to shame. Why? Because “there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, because the same Lord of all richly blesses all who call on him.” Now, that seems like an odd point to us, but it carried weight with Paul’s audience because this was the debate that defined their times. For them, all the world was divided into one of those two groups. Either you were a Jew or you were not. The point here, then, is that God gives the blessing of salvation to anyone who reaches for it in Christ no matter who they are or where they are from. “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
God shows no partiality here. None at all. What Jesus did on the cross, He did for the whole world. Remember what He said to Nicodemus and that His followers have cherished ever since? “For God loved the world in this way.” It wasn’t just one people who were to be the beneficiaries of God’s love if they chose to receive it. It was every people. And as Paul revealed back in Romans 4, this was always God’s plan. He invited Abraham into His intentions to bless the whole world with the revelation of Himself and a way into a right relationship with Him. Jesus simply completed that mission. Salvation is truly for everybody. The Gospel is for everyone.
Now, think for a second where Paul began this section, and you can see how powerful an idea this really is. The Gospel is for you. It is for you no matter how far from God you think you’ve wandered. It is for you no matter how broken you think your life is or you are. It does not matter what your circumstances are or have been. The Gospel is for everyone, including you. The Gospel is for me. It is for people who are like us. It is for people who are not like us. It is for people we like. It is for people we don’t like. The Gospel is for everyone. There isn’t a person you will meet who the Gospel of the salvation of God in Christ is somehow not for. And Paul can say this with some authority because he was once one who many believed would never embrace the Gospel. Salvation may have been for most, but it was not for him. He was too far gone in his opposition to it. And then he wasn’t. And then He encountered Jesus. And then He received by faith what only Jesus can give. He received the Gospel. The Gospel is for everyone.
Does everyone know this, though? Not even remotely so. But lest you think that represents some kind of injustice or intractable obstacle to God’s goodness, stay with me in the text. Paul addresses that concern with what He says next. “How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in?” Isn’t that the question for which this incredibly broad availability of the Gospel is demanding an answer? If everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, then how are people supposed to call on Him if they haven’t believed in Him or even known to believe in Him? Well, they have to hear about Him first. “And how can they believe without hearing about him?” It’s like Paul is reading our minds. Okay, so they need to hear about Him. Who’s going to take care of that? “And how can they hear without a preacher?” That’s the real question, isn’t it?
And don’t imagine a preacher only in the mold that I’m filling right now. Paul is thinking far more broadly than that. He’s talking about anyone who proclaims, who declares, who simply shares the message of the Gospel with another person. Yes, I do that each week up here, but this isn’t the only way. I had a doctor’s appointment this past week. The nurse checking me in started telling me about what has been going on in her life. She’s got her first grandbaby on the way and is as excited as can be about that. I was asking about her life because I was looking for the opportunity to plant a Gospel seed if one came along. As she was telling me about the first ultrasound and seeing those pictures of the tiny life growing in her daughter’s womb, though, she slipped in a line on me: “I just don’t know how you can encounter the wonder of life like this and not believe in God.”
What was that? She was being a preacher who was making sure I had heard about Jesus so that I could believe in Him. No, she didn’t give me anything like a full sermon, but she didn’t have to. Sometimes merely the introduction is what God intends for us to accomplish. And she did that. She did it at no small risk. A complaint about her speaking so openly about her own faith could cost her her job. She was much relieved when I told her I’m a pastor. But that doesn’t take away from her courageous faithfulness. She understood that the Gospel is for everyone, but someone has to share it with them. She offered a superb example to follow.
So, no, people won’t hear without a preacher of some sort absent God’s direct intervention, but how will such preachers be located? They have to be raised up and sent. That’s what Paul addresses next. Verse 15 now: “And how can they preach unless they are sent?” The question is: are you sent? And if you are, who will do the sending? The answer to the first question is, yes, you are. If you are a follower of Jesus, you have been sent. He did the sending first. I’m doing it now.
As a follower of Jesus, your job is to share the message of the Gospel with a world longing to hear it. This is a welcome and timely message anywhere and everywhere it is proclaimed. Paul affirms that with another quote from Isaiah: “As it is written: ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.’” The word translated as “beautiful” in just about every translation is one that also means “timely” or “welcome.” Those are probably better translations for understanding purposes, but modern translators tend to keep the quote from Isaiah in its original form. The Gospel is for everyone, but someone has to share it with them. That person’s arrival with that good news is always timely.
Now, that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be well received, much less accepted. Paul understands that. “But not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, ‘Lord, who has believed our message?’” Many don’t and won’t. But no one will if we don’t share it. “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ.” That’s a message that needs to be proclaimed. The Gospel is for everyone, but someone has to share it with them. Why couldn’t that be you? What is keeping you from taking that bold step? It’s one Jesus Himself commissioned all of His followers to take. You don’t have to be eloquent or fancy. My nurse simply made a statement designed to get me thinking in hopes that I would follow that line of thinking to its logical end. The reason we got to celebrate Charlie’s profession of faith when he came as a candidate for baptism last week was because someone invited him to church. What could be easier than inviting someone to church? So it doesn’t have to be a lot, but you can say something. The Gospel is for everyone, but someone has to tell them about it.
And make no mistake: We live in the midst of a culture that wants to hear it. I suspect many of you have heard of the country artist named Shaboozey. He’s not one I would look to for a lot of theological depth. His first major hit, Tipsy, is all about having a great time getting absolutely smashed at a bar. His most recent single, though, paints a different picture. It’s still about a guy sitting at a bar, but instead of having a great time partying, he’s sitting there by himself, reflecting on how awful, how empty, and how totally unfulfilled his life is. He’s lonely. He doesn’t have any close relationships. He says, “What a [heck] of a year it’s been/Keep on bluffin’, but I just can’t win/Drowned my sorrows but they learned to swim.” The rest of the verses are equally depressing. Not even the devil would walk a mile in his shoes. It’s a marked contrast from the peppy beat the song has. The only thing he knows is the “cold truth” of a bottle of beer that just keeps reinforcing how hard things are and how alone he really is.
Then comes the chorus. Over and over again he repeats one idea: “All I really need is a little good news.” Do you want to try to guess with me how many people are going to hear this song now that it is blasting out to millions of listeners on radios and streaming services all over the country and think to themselves, “You know, he’s right. My life is a mess. I really do wish I could hear some good news”? Jesus was right: the fields are white with harvest. We can pray to the Lord of the harvest for workers to collect it, but we’re already here. We’re the answer to that prayer before it even gets prayed. We have that good news that Shaboozey and who knows how many millions of others are going to be crying out for when they hear his song. The Gospel is for everyone, but someone has to tell them about it.
So, let’s do it. Let’s be a people who tell someone about the Gospel that is for everyone. In fact, let’s tell all the someones. Let’s tell everyone someone we meet. Let’s live out the message well so that our lifestyle properly matches our confession. Let’s look for the opportunity to drop seeds like my nurse did. Let’s offer an invitation like someone did for Charlie. Let’s stay tuned in for the chance to have deeper conversations than that. Let’s be the preachers who give people a hearing so they can believe, call on the name of the Lord, and receive the salvation He offers. Let us be people with beautiful, timely feet. The Gospel is for everyone, but someone has to tell them about it. Let’s make sure that’s us.