After fourteen chapters of dense argument, Paul's letter slows enough to sound like a man talking about his own life. 14"I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness." He has spent the letter teaching, and near the end he tells them they hardly needed the lesson. He wrote boldly anyway, he says, 15"because of the grace given me by God," and that phrase keeps everything he says about himself from turning into pride.
He is 16"a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God." Paul reaches for the language of the temple to describe his preaching. He is a priest offering people, Gentile converts themselves as the sacrifice, made acceptable by the Spirit who sanctified them. Every sermon he has preached is an act of worship at an altar, and the offering laid on it is a changed life.
18"I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me." Paul has planted churches from Jerusalem around to Illyricum, hundreds of miles of pioneering work, and he will not take credit for a mile. It belongs to Christ working by the power of the Spirit. Paul's ambition never had room for his own name.
The ambition itself is stated plainly: 20"not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else's foundation." The Greek word behind "ambition" is built from the word for honor. Paul has redirected the ordinary human hunger for honor toward a single target, the places no one else has reached. Isaiah's old promise, that those who have never been told will see, becomes Paul's job description.
Then Paul explains why he has not yet visited Rome. He is going to Jerusalem first with a collection from the churches of Macedonia and Achaia for the poor believers there. 27"they owe it to them." A gift freely given and a debt honestly owed, Gentile churches returning material help for the spiritual inheritance they had received from Jewish believers.
Then Paul asks for something he rarely asks so directly. 30"strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf." The word behind "strive together" pictures a wrestling match, and Paul wants the Roman church in the ring beside him. Two dangers weigh on him, hostility from unbelievers in Judea and the possibility that Jewish believers would refuse a gift carried by uncircumcised hands. The unity he has defended in this letter was about to be tested by whether a collection could cross that line.
History answered the prayer in a way Paul could not have predicted. He reached Jerusalem, and hostility came just as he feared, but it was Roman soldiers, stopping a mob from killing him, who kept him alive long enough to reach Rome after all. The prayer was answered in a way no one praying it that day would have guessed.
The letter's argument ends on a blessing. 33"May the God of peace be with you all. Amen." It is the peace the letter has been building toward, spoken over a church Paul had never visited and was still praying his way toward.
Whose foundation are you building on, and where is the place that no one has yet reached?
Prayer
Father, thank you for a gospel that reaches those who have never heard, carried by people willing to build nothing on someone else's foundation. Thank you for the churches who gave and the ones who received, and for the strange way you answered a prayer neither could have predicted. Teach us to strive together in prayer as Paul asked the Romans to, and be the God of peace among us. In Jesus' name, amen.