Today I want to tell you about an imaginary town. The town is Duckville and everyone that lives there is a duck. That’s right. Everyone is a duck. The stores are duck stores. The movie theater is a duck theater. The park is a duck park. The church is duck church.
On Sunday, all of the ducks waddled off to duck church to hear what kind of a preacher? A duck preacher. In that church they didn’t have a children’s sermon. They had a duckling or baby duck sermon.
On this particular Sunday, as the duck preacher stood at the pulpit, the duck preacher spoke eloquently of how God had given the ducks wings with which to fly. She pounded the pulpit with her beak and said, “With these wings, there is nowhere we ducks can not go! There is no God-given task we ducks cannot accomplish! With these wings we no longer need walk through life. We can soar high in the sky!”
The ducks quacked, “Amen!” throughout the duck congregation. The duck preacher concluded her message by exclaiming, “With our wings we can fly through life! WE ….. CAN …. FLY!!!!” More ducks quacked out loud “AMENS!” in response. Every duck loved the service. In fact, all the ducks that were present commented on what a wonderfully convicting message they had heard from their duck preacher.
Then when they left the church, they waddled all the way home. They didn’t fly like the duck preacher told them they could do. They went home just like they came to church, waddling.
Sometimes we have the same kind of problem the ducks had.
When we come to church, we come to thank God for all He’s done for us. We come to praise Him. We also come to learn things about God. Even though God can talk to us anywhere, we come to church to hear what God wants us to do. We want to hear God.
Too many times, when God talks to us at church, we don’t hear God. We aren’t listening. We need to pay attention and listen for God when we are at church and when we aren’t at church. God is going to help us do wonderful things. When we leave church each Sunday, we should be different than when we came to church.
Starting with the fact that faith is necessary, Paul asks how anyone can possibly call on the Lord for His promised salvation without believing the promise. Then he asks how anyone can come to this belief without being told what is available to believe. He follows with a question as to how people can hear without someone telling them. This in turn leads to a question as to how people can tell others about the promised salvation of God without being sent as those who will tell. In the context of Paul’s argument, his point is that if the gospel is available to the whole race, the whole race must know about it, and the telling of it to the whole race will require considerably more involvement in Gentile ministry than has been evidenced by the Jews of Paul’s day.
Before people can call, they must believe. Before they can believe, they must hear. Before they can hear, someone must preach the message. Before they can preach, they must be sent. Isaiah 52:7 speaks of those who take the message of God’s good news and deliver it so that it can be believed.
The Jews failed to respond in Paul’s day, Jesus’ day, and Isaiah’s day. Not all who hear will respond. Hearing and believing produces new life; hearing and refusing produces death. The problem is not with the message or the messenger but with the hearer.
To his own people, the Jews, who are upset at his ministry and scandalized by his message of God’s grace to the Gentiles, Paul is saying, “Come join me in the exciting acceptance of salvation through Christ and the ensuing sharing of the message of glad tidings and good things with those who have never heard.” The same emphasis is necessary to those who sit comfortably in Christian pews, untouched by the condition of more than half the world’s population which has no knowledge of God’s Son. The apostle’s words ring true and clear. How will these people call on the Lord if they don’t believe, and isn’t their believing dependent on hearing? And surely hearing is related to telling, and the telling is exclusively in the hands of those who sense that Christ has commissioned His people to take the message to the uttermost parts of the earth. Starting with the fact that faith is necessary, he asks how anyone can possibly call on the Lord for His promised salvation without believing the promise. Then he asks how anyone can come to this belief without being told what is available to believe.
Paul refers to Deuteronomy 32:21 and Isaiah 65:1-2 as evidence of the Gentiles’ eagerness to turn to God. God is pictured as stretching out His hands, open and welcoming, but to a disobedient and contrary people who have rejected His offer. Now His crucified, resurrected Son holds out His nail-scarred hands for all who will reach out and grasp them.
The Lord of the Universe, whose heart is open to all people, will not be limited by the failure of His own people to believe as they ought and to act as they should. On the contrary, He is committed to seeing that even though His people may be a “disobedient and contrary people,” this in itself will not hinder His purposes of making salvation available to all people in all ages through the preaching of the gospel. Everything that we need to know in regard to salvation—what it is, why we need it, how we can receive it—can be found in God’s Word. God blesses us when we hear His promises and respond in faith to them.
(An audio version of the message can be found by clicking this link: Romans 10 verses 14-21 Listen to the Good News and Respond to It)
Bibliography
- Jeremiah, David: The Jeremiah Study Bible: New King James Version (Brentwood, TN: Worthy Publishing; 2013; p. 1559)
- “Duckville.” Retrieved from www.sermons4kids.com/sermons/duckville
- Briscoe, D.S.; & Ogilvie, L.J.: The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Vol. 29: Romans (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Inc.; 1982; pp. 198-201
- Stanley, C.F.: The Charles F. Stanley Life Principles Bible: New King James Version (Nashville, TN: Nelson Bibles; 2005)
