Missions in the Letter to the Romans | Romans
Rodney Tolleson | April 19, 2026
I’m going to ask you to turn to the book of Romans, Romans 1. So if you’re using the Bible—do you still have Bibles that are available in the racks there? If you’re using that Bible, I think it’s page 939. But we’re going to be looking at a selection of verses from Romans 1, and then eventually a selection of verses from Romans 15, and then just a phrase or two from Romans 16 this morning.
What I want us to think about together is the story of missions from Paul’s letter to the Romans, and we’re going to divide our thoughts into three main ideas this morning:
1. Sending Missionaries (Romans 1)
2. Supporting Missions (Romans 15
3. For the Glory of God
We’ll just have a phrase or two from Romans 16.
1. Sending Missionaries (Romans 1)
So this morning let me read for us Romans 1:1-6.
“Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ…”
So for this morning, number one, I want us to think about sending missionaries. I want to just start by making a couple of observations about the entire book of Romans and then a couple of observations about this passage that we have just read together, and then I’m going to zero in on this idea of New Testament apostleship and some similarities between the New Testament apostles called by Jesus Christ to be witnesses to Christ’s resurrection, and modern-day or historical missionaries.
So, first of all, the book of Romans is actually very much like a missionary letter. Pastors receive a lot of missionary letters because we receive a lot of appeals for finances, and some of them we can respond to in a positive way and some of them we cannot. But nevertheless, there are some similarities between the book of Romans and a missionary letter.
First of all, Paul starts by talking about his missionary work. He calls himself an apostle and God’s calling him to be an apostle. He speaks about wanting to bring the gospel so that there will be the obedience of faith (in verse 5), for the sake of God’s name among all the nations. Then he ends his book in Romans 16—and we’ll see this towards the end of the message this morning—in a very similar way. He ends that book talking about the same themes. He talks about the obedience of faith among all the nations for the glory of God. In chapter 10 he kind of throws in this phrase, if we cut into Romans 10:14-15—he talks about, “How are they going to hear the gospel unless someone is preaching the gospel? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?”
Then in chapter 15 (we’ll look at a few verses from chapter 15 in a little bit in point number two), he talks about his travel plans and he talks about needing financial contributions. So you can’t have a missionary letter without almost a missionary envelope, right, to have a way to give to those missionaries. And usually they talk, maybe, about their travel plans. In fact, when Brian prayed this morning he talked about praying for your missionaries who are going to be traveling to Senegal. So this is stacking up to be a missionary letter.
Then in between, if you kind of take Romans 2 down through the middle of Romans 15, what you see is Paul the apostle wanting to help the Roman Christians and the Roman church be well established doctrinally and spiritually and healthy as a community, so that they can send him on his next missionary journey in his hope to go to Spain to plant churches and to spread the gospel. So the book of Romans—one of the lenses that you can use to look at the book of Romans is that it is in some sense a missionary letter. That’s the lens that we’re going to use this morning.
Now let me point out a couple of things from the passage that we looked at together so far this morning. First of all, we have the message of missions. He talks about, in verse 1, the gospel of God. And then he mentions in verse 2 the Old Testament promise of missions, “which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures concerning his Son.” So this promise of the gospel message that is to come in the Lord Jesus Christ. Then there’s the objective of missions, which I’ve already mentioned in verse 5, the obedience of faith; and there’s the scope of missions, also in verse 5—that is, to all the nations—and finally, the purpose of missions: for the sake of his name.
But the main thing that I want to point out this morning about missions from Romans 1 is that God sends missionaries. God sends missionaries. And there is a sense in which, although churches are a part of that sending, they are only doing it on behalf of God, and we could ultimately say that only God is able to send missionaries.
So I want to focus on Paul’s references to his apostleship to point this out. In verse 1, “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle.” And then again in verse 5, speaking of the Lord Jesus Christ, “through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations.”
So let me start by saying what I’m not meaning by this.
Modern and historical missionaries are not fulfilling the New Testament office of apostleship. There are definite differences, and in a tradition like yours and mine we believe that the office of apostleship ended roughly with the closing of the canon of the New Testament. Modern missionaries are not exactly like the New Testament apostles.
However, there are some similarities. Modern and historical missionaries are messengers of the gospel that are tasked with bringing the love and message of God to the nations. Now, for example, in the book of Romans and often throughout the New Testament the word translated “nations,” as well as the word for “Gentiles”—for example, down in verse 13 there is the mention of the Gentiles. Paul the apostle wants to reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles. Those two words are both different translations of the same Greek word, ethnos, which some of you will be familiar with, in the Greek New Testament.
So people today, like the New Testament apostles, bring the gospel, the message of the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the nations, whether they are technically Gentiles (as most of the nations are) or whether they are not.
Also, we might think about this word of apostleship and its similarity to modern missionaries in this sense: the secular use of the Greek word for “apostle” (which, by the way is easy to remember; it’s simply apostolos), that secular use was simply—it was used for an emissary who was given a message and authority to exercise and deliver on behalf of a royal authority in the ancient world. The verb form of that Greek noun simply meant “to send.” So, like the New Testament apostles, missionaries are sent. They are sent by God.
Again, there is a sense in which they are sent by local churches, but much more than that they are sent by God.
So a comparison—a New Testament and even modern church comparison—would be, just like in Ephesians 4 God promises to provide pastors and teachers to the local church to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, God sends missionaries to the nations, to the ethnos, to preach the gospel and to plant churches. Missionaries experience an inner desire—we might refer to that as an inner call—but they shouldn’t just immediately go. Some have. Some of you might be familiar with the story of Bruchko; he just went, right, and struggled perhaps because of it. But nevertheless, missionaries shouldn’t just go because of that inner call; that should be confirmed by ministry within the local church and by, perhaps, ordination by the local church, to be sent out by God.
Those two things—that inner desire and that affirmation by a local church—I believe add up to the hand of God on those missionaries, sent like apostles—not immediately equivalent to apostles but similar to them—to witness to the nations the message of the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe that this is in accord with Jesus Christ’s instructions in Luke 10. In Luke 10:1-2 Jesus gives instructions to his representatives, this time to 72.
“After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them on ahead of him, two by two, into every town and place where he himself was about to go. And he said to them, ‘The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.’”
This is also similar to the reflections of Paul the apostle that I’ve already referred to in Romans 10:14-15, where he talks about “how will they hear unless somebody preaches, and how will somebody preach unless they have been sent?” God sends missionaries.
But how should we be affirming that, and how should we be ministering to missionaries, and how should we be participating in God’s sending of missionaries?
Well, first of all, all of us should be praying that God would send out more laborers to the harvest among the nations. All of us should be praying that way, and we should be open to being sent in some way ourselves. If the Lord puts it on your heart or grows within you a desire to do missionary work, then you should respond to that by prayer. It’s interesting that Jesus sent 72 and told the same 72 to pray that God would be giving them more and more harvesters along the way. So pray for more harvesters if God puts that desire on your heart. Then you should share that with your church and let them help you in discerning God’s will and affirming God’s sending you as well.
Not everyone is called to be a missionary, and we should also be alert to that reality as well. Not everyone that has maybe a temporary desire, maybe a little bit of a spiritual hiccup that wants to go to the field should necessarily be sent. Mature, godly believers who are already doing ministry at home should be sent abroad, not just because of some personal ambition or because of kind of a guilty feeling within or some other motivation. Only God can truly send missionaries.
2. Supporting Missionaries
So, if it is God’s responsibility to send missionaries, then it is the responsibility of churches to support them, to support missionaries. So number two, supporting missionaries and supporting missions.
Let’s take a quick look at Romans 15, beginning in verse 22. This is a little bit of a longer passage. I’m going to read Romans 15:22-33.
“This is the reason why I have so often been hindered from coming to you. But now, since I no longer have any room for work in these regions, and since I have longed for many years to come to you, I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you. I know that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.
“I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, so that by God's will I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company. May the God of peace be with you all. Amen.”
So Paul the apostle here is talking about what I referred to earlier, some of his travel plans, talking about making a collection already and delivering that to Jerusalem and expecting these Christians at Rome to help him along his way as he goes to Spain. So again, this is one of those portions of the book that is very similar to a missionary letter.
So if God is sending missionaries, it is the call of the church to support missions. There is a great personal cost to be a missionary, and churches are called to be there to support and to encourage and to minister to those missionaries.
There are basically three ways that I want to say that we can do that, from this text, from Romans 15.
(1) First of all, Christian missionaries need Christian fellowship. Maybe a more human way of saying it, a more ordinary way of saying it, is missionaries need friends, too. Missionaries need friends, too. They are separated from family, from community, from local churches like these, and that’s hard, and they need friends too.
Paul acknowledges this. In verse 23 he says that he has longed to come to them for many years. In verse 24 he acknowledges that once he comes to them he will simply enjoy their company for a little while, and in verse 32 he says that he will be refreshed in their company. If Paul needed that friendship and fellowship and encouragement, then certainly modern missionaries need that as well. Your missionaries need you to be their friend! Write them an email. All of us have noticed at times when God has providentially allowed someone to send us a note or an email or a text or a direct message or even (maybe a few years ago) a phone call, right, that that has been just at the right moment.
When you think of one of your missionaries, number one, pray for them; and number two, send them a note that you have been praying. Ask them specifically, perhaps, how are their children doing, “How can we pray more specifically for you?” Missionaries need friends, too.
(2) Missionaries also need financial support. Paul the apostle mentions this also in verse 24. He talks about needing to be helped on his journey to Spain by the Roman believers. Now, that phrase, “helped along the way,” in some way or another pops up in the book of Acts, also in Titus 3, and in the book of 3 John, to talk almost in a technical way about how churches financially support missionaries. He was hoping and expecting that they would give some financial resources for him to make the journey and to get established in Spain so that he could preach the gospel and plant churches.
Paul also mentions in verse 26 that they are making a contribution—not the Roman church, excuse me. The churches in Macedonia and Achaia have made a contribution to the church at Jerusalem. That word for “contribution” is another Greek word that you’re going to be familiar with; it’s actually koinonia. It means fellowship and partnership. It means that this giving towards the ministry in Jerusalem for these churches in Macedonia and Achaia was literally a ministry and spiritual partnership that they were having with those people. So financial support to your missionaries is a partnership in their gospel ministry.
When I was growing up, my parents had a bulletin board by the telephone that hung on the wall in our kitchen, and on it were missionary letters and pictures of missionaries that they would from time to time support. It was a reminder to my sister and I that there’s more to this than just me and my family or me and my church, but there are people—and for us it was people in Canada, and it was the people in a neighboring town in Texas, and there were some other people that were doing ministry and needed prayer and support.
I often encourage people at Community Bible Church to adopt a missionary and to support them with prayer and to support them financially, to invest in them enough. And if you will do that, you will be the primary beneficiary of that partnership.
(3) Finally, our Christian missionaries need serious prayer. They need serious prayer. He says in verse 30 for them to “strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf.” He was a church planter; he needed their support, he needed their prayers.
Sometimes the prayer needs to be for submission to God’s will. Paul the apostle wanted to make it to Rome, but he didn’t want to get there in chains. He was incarcerated by the time he actually got to Rome, because of the riot in Jerusalem that is recorded in the book of Acts. So he had to submit his desires to the Lord, even as these people were praying.
Now, I’ve tried to make this point: being a missionary is costly, and missionaries need the church’s support.
I want to use some illustrations from the lives of John and Margaret Paton to talk about the cost of missionary work. Over the last several weeks, Jenny and I have been reading through the missionary letters of Margaret Paton. She wrote them (the ones that we were reading) between 1865 and 1894, so roughly thirty years, from their mission station on the island of Aniwa in the South Pacific. Some of the cost of missions for them was loneliness and anxiety. Margaret often wrote about how she worried about her children. She was desperately lonely for them after they had to send them to Australia for schooling. She wanted to just see them, and one time she just got sick right at the wrong moment and she couldn’t get on the boat and she couldn’t go to see her children in Australia, and how that broke her heart.
She tells about one time when she had been away from their island of Aniwa to get medical care for their infant child, their little infant baby boy, and she had to be gone, because it was on a ship in those days and not on a plane, she had to be gone for several weeks. She was terribly worried. She was anxious about their toddler daughter. They called her Min, and she was worried so much about their little two-year-old daughter because they lived in this wild place with all kinds of diseases. She was literally anxious and afraid that her daughter would die while she was gone. So as she was returning on the boat her husband John knew how anxious she would be, so he held that little girl up above the heads of all the people on the beach so she would know, “I can stop worrying about my little girl. She’s alive, with her dress flowing in the wind.”
Another price for missionaries is isolation. Margaret talked about how wonderful it was to go and to see other missionaries on these little islands that are dotted in kind of an archipelago in the South Pacific, and how she would look forward to missionaries coming to her, and how she would look forward to going to see other missionaries as well. They were isolated. Some years they would only get letters once a year from home. We shouldn’t think that the Internet has necessarily solved the sense of isolation and loneliness that missionaries continue to feel.
The most serious cost of missions for missionaries is literally danger, threats to their health and even to their lives. One time John and Margaret were visiting another island to see fellow missionaries, and they were enjoying the idyllic grounds of the mission compound that had already been built there, and they enjoyed the grass and the cool shade, and they enjoyed the scenery of a river that flowed nearby, and they enjoyed the scenery of mountains that rose in the distance. But as they were walking through that idyllic sort of pathway and enjoying that place, they also looked up in the middle distance and they saw at least three white grave markers of the previous missionaries who had been murdered by savage natives that no longer wanted the gospel ministry to be there.
Can you imagine looking out your kitchen window and seeing the gravestones of people who had not counted their lives worthy to be held on to, but instead gave their own blood for people to hear the gospel? That’s what those missionaries that lived on that island lived with.
There was another time when the reward was so rich. There was a reward for Margaret Paton. One time she visited, after a sort of quasi-retirement, she went back to Aniwa, and they had buried two children there. And one of her girls—she had mentored this girl, and this girl, honestly, had been quite a rascal. She had not been faithful in her marriage. But she had come around and she had begun to live a faithful Christian life. As they passed by those graves, this young woman, who was now a mother, said, “These two belong to us. These two will rise with us on the day of resurrection.” There is a reward for the cost of missions.
3. Missions for the Glory of God
I want to talk about that reward in point number three, missions for the glory of God. At the beginning of Romans 1, Paul talks about sharing the gospel “for the sake of his name among all the nations,” and at the end of chapter 16 Paul talks about preaching Jesus Christ that “has been made known to all the nations, to bring about the obedience of faith,” and then he closes with this doxology in chapter 16: “To the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Yes, there is a cost to missions, and we should bear part of that cost even if we are not sent, but we are part of sending missionaries. We should bear that cost. Paul the apostle himself was not into his ministry of church planting and apostleship just because he wanted to trot the globe. He wasn’t doing this so that he could get shipwrecked and beaten and left for dead and incarcerated for his health. He was doing it for the glory of God. God sends missionaries, churches support missionaries, and people, the nations, respond to the gospel for the glory of God.
Now, as we close, I want us to think about the reward, if you’re part of the supporting team. You know how Jesus Christ himself says that “the angels in heaven rejoice when one sinner repents.” Have you ever thought about why that is? The angels rejoice because God rejoices!
An illustration of this would be something that scientifically is called sympathetic resonance. Piano tuners don’t really use tuning forks anymore, but if they did they would hit that tuning fork on something and they would hold it near the piano. Usually it’s the A above middle C, and they tune that one first. But sometimes, if you hit that tuning fork and you hold it close enough to the A string, the A string itself will begin to vibrate.
The angels in heaven rejoice when a sinner repents because they have a sympathetic resonance with the rejoicing of God’s heart itself! And we can too. We can rejoice with the very joy of God! The reward of missions is to join the joy of God when sinners come to him through the Lord Jesus Christ. And the senders and the sent and the supporters can all join in that joy. Let’s pray.
I want to give you a few moments to reflect on what God has spoken to us in his word. Draw near to the heart of God that rejoices in sinners repenting and coming to him in faith, the obedience of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. Maybe the Lord is tugging on your heart to be sent. Maybe the Lord is tugging on your heart to be more supporting of missions. You take a few moments to commit your heart to responding to the Lord, and then I’ll lead us in prayer.
O, dear, heavenly Father, we are so grateful that you sent missionaries to the part of the world that started, maybe for many of us, a chain of godly witness, gospel witness, to ultimately bring the gospel to our own hearts and to bring Christ before our eyes and to bring us to yourself through him. And Lord, we pray that you would continue to send laborers out into the harvest field of the world to plant churches and to present the gospel to the hearts who maybe don’t know about Jesus, have never even heard the name of Jesus. So Lord, draw hearts, even here at Redeemer Church, to go; give this church the resources to support; and may every believer, whether going or supporting, may all of us join in the joy of your heart when sinners come to you. In the name of Jesus we pray, amen.