Minister

DEVOTION

ROMANS

MINISTER

Rom 15:14-16

14 I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another. 15 I have written you quite boldly on some points, as if to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me 16 to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles with the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

NIV

Surely a personal note to these readers of this letter in Rome, for none of us would meet these requirements to be a minister of Christ to the Gentiles. Yet that is exactly what we are. We minister to each other, we minister the message of the Gospel to each other in the way we treat each other, in brotherly love. We minister to each other because we are full of goodness, we are full of the Holy Spirit who is the personification of goodness. We are complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another again because we are full of the Holy Spirit who leads in into all truth. We may not all write to each other with boldness on some points, but we should either write or speak to each other with boldness, with confidence regarding the truth. It does seem a little odd to consider us doing our priestly duties, for who of us is a priest? Yet, that is precisely who we are.

1 Peter 2:9-10

9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. 10 Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

NIV

We are a chosen people a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God. We are all priests and should be engaged in our priestly duties of declaring the praises of God to the people in the darkness, so they can come into the light. But the other aspect of being a royal priesthood is that we are an offering accepting to God and we have been sanctified, or made holy, by the Holy Spirit. How could we be anything but made holy because we are full of the Holy Spirit? So let us minister.