Romans 1:11-12 Sermon: Mutual Encouragement and the Christian
This past Sunday, I had the privilege of preaching at my Church’s evening service. Since I taught a narrative text from Numbers 14 the last time I preached, I decided this time to choose an Epistle. I chose Romans 1:11-12 for my passage. Sermon title’s always cause me some difficulty, so I settled on “Mutual Encouragement and the Christian.” The link to the sermon video is below, along with the link to the audio file.
Link to Romans 1:11-12 Sermon Audio
Why I chose Romans 1:11-12
I keep a google drive with all sorts of “sermon skeletons“. Essentially, when a text of scripture grips me, I make a brief outline to lay out how I would teach that text if I ever got the opportunity to. This allows me to be somewhat prepared ahead of time if I end up getting a chance to preach. Even though I had many of these sermon outlines ready to go, when my Pastor asked me to preach, there was only one text I wanted to teach: Romans 1:11-12.
For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine.
Romans 1:11-12, ESV
Why choose these couple verses? First, because these couple verses at the front of Romans have been on my mind all year. As a goal for 2021, I have set out to try to memorize the book of Romans. One of the benefits and blessings of doing this is meditating on lesser known portions of the Epistle. Verses 11-12 of Romans 1 in particular stood out to me as containing important truths about faith, encouragement, and the Church.
The second reason I chose these verses is I saw them come alive in my interactions with the local Church. Seeing and experiencing mutual encouragement among my fellow local Church members caused my mind to jump back to Romans 1:11-12. I didn’t just know these verses. My eyes were seeing them lived out in front of me. I was experiencing the truths of the passage as I was encouraged in ordinary conversations with local Church members.
In the end, there was no other text I wanted to preach. Paul’s couple sentences to the Roman Church had stewed in my mind for a couple months and I had seen enough examples of the verses come to life that I was gripped. Preaching gave me an opportunity to delve deeper into the verses myself and to share what I had learned with the body.
How I prepared the sermon
There were a number of tools I used to prepare this sermon. The first was breaking the passage into its components. I tried to understanding the historical setting, where the text occurs in the flow of Romans, and the characteristics of the two main “characters” in the passage (Paul and the Roman Church). After that, I identified the key words and phrases I needed to define in order to understand the passage.
The tool I used most for this sermon, however, was Iterative Bible Study. As soon as I heard I was preaching, I made a very rough outline of the text fairly easily. Using that, I identified gaps in my knowledge which I needed to go back and fill. Check out my Iterative Bible Study approach to see how I actually did this.
Finally, once I had done a couple rounds of study on the text, I started thinking of practical implications. To do this, I used the Puritan application questions. I love these questions. Simply by answering them, I was able to come up with about 7 implications that follow from the truths of Romans 1:11-12. I only gave 5 implications in the actual sermon for the sake of time.
All in all, this was the easiest and most pleasant sermon preparation I have experienced yet. My other two times preaching took a lot longer and I struggled much more with the structure of the sermon. But because I had spent so much time thinking about the text personally and since I took advantage of some of my own Bible study tools, prepping for teaching was a breeze.
If you are going to teach, you need good tools. The better the tools, the less time you will spend thinking of where to start and the more time you can devote to meditating on the text itself.
Outline of the sermon
I conclude with the outline of my sermon. In a future post, I will format my notes for reading. In the end, I tried to structure my sermon the way John Flavel laid out his sermons: define the terms of the text, define the doctrine, expound the doctrine, apply the doctrine. I plan to do a future post on the different ways to structure a teaching. Personally, however, I found this structure very effective for preaching a shorter couple verses like Romans 1:11-12.
- Introduction
- Why text is important
- Overview of sermon structure
- Definition of terms and doctrine
- Define key words
- Summarize key reality/doctrine of text
- Expounding the doctrine
- Encouragement in the NT
- Truth encourages
- Christ Encourages
- God encourages
- Other believers encourage
- How faith can encourage
- Faith sets an example
- Other people’s faith in action makes ours more enduring
- What do Paul and the Roman Church have in common
- Not much at a surface level
- From different geographies
- Different levels of knowledge
- Paul called as an apostle
- Much on a spiritual level
- Same problem-sin
- Same need-Christ’s righteousness
- Same present-living out Christian life
- Not much at a surface level
- Encouragement in the NT
- Implications of doctrine
- Your faith needs encouragement
- You need the local Church
- Talk about your faith with others
- Don’t think your faith is above encouragement from others
- Even small conversations build up the Church
There you have it! I truly am grateful to the Lord and my Pastor for giving me this third opportunity to preach from the pulpit. The best way to learn how to preach and to improve is simply to do it. I pray the tools on The Average Churchman will help you when you are called to teach or preach.
Check out the Tools page to look through resources I use to prepare my sermons and study a passage. To listen to either of my other two sermons, head over to the Preaching page. Be sure to follow The Average Churchman on Instagram if you haven’t already!