THE IMPORTANCE OF A PROPER GREETING

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people:

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 1:7

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Yesterday, we began our study of Paul’s letter to the people in Rome by looking at the first six verses of his opening salutation. In those verses, we found Paul declare who he was as the author of the letter.

In telling of his identity, we saw where Paul not focused on himself but rather Jesus. It was Jesus who called him to be a servant and apostle. It was Jesus who set him apart and purposed him to share the Gospel with all people, both Jew and Gentile. And it was Jesus, God’s Son who had been prophesied as the coming Messiah by the prophets, who could bring salvation to those who believed in Him, not by works but rather by grace.

Paul was called by Jesus to serve Him and now Paul was letting his readers know that they too had been called. That’s what we learn as Paul finished the first six verses.

But Paul wasn’t finished with his opening. For as we see in today’s single verse, verse 7 of Romans 1, he wanted to send a proper greeting to the people he was writing to. Look again at these words:

To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people:

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Letter writing is an art and unfortunately today, I think it is fast becoming a lost art form given the propensity of e-mail and texting. People rarely take the time to sit down, take up pen or pencil in hand, and handwrite a note to someone these days and that’s a little sad to me.

I know when I was in school many years ago, we learned about the proper way to write a letter to someone and there was a hint of technical process to it. Essentially, there were three components: the greeting, the body, and finally the closing.

The first part of the letter, the greeting, was (and is still) very important. It sets the tone for what follows and, yes, words matter. They matter greatly.

Begin your letter with the wrong words and a person might just stop and not read the rest of what you have written. More than a few letters have been crumpled up and disposed of after just a few lines of the opening were read.

The apostle Paul fully knew the criticality attached to beginning his letters properly and he wrote many of them. In fact, most of the New Testament outside of the Gospels is dominated by his epistles as he wrote to the different fledgling churches he planted. We’re starting to look at Paul’s letter to the Romans but we’ll continue to see others as we continue to walk out way through New Testament study. For now, we look at Romans 1 and see first-hand how Paul displays the importance of a proper greeting.  

Note that he begins by identifying the audience, the people the message is intended for. In this case, Paul makes it known that he is writing to “all in Rome” and “all” means “all”. He is writing to Christians and non-Christians alike here and Paul wants them to all know two important things:

First, they are loved by God (capital “G”).

Religiously, the Roman society was very polytheistic in their beliefs with twelve primary gods (small “g”) that they worshipped, some maybe more familiar to you than others. There was Mars and Mercury and Venus but there was also Juno, Vulcan, and Vesta. Each of the Roman gods served a certain purpose and so not any one of them was believed to be able to serve every need of the people. Not that believing in any of them mattered anyways because none of them were real in the first place.

This is what makes Paul’s opening statement so important for he is letting all Romans know that there is a God they have not given attention to, one supreme God who loves them deeply, even though they have not invested time in knowing and loving Him first. Such is the special nature of the Lord God Almighty.

The second main thing that Paul wanted all the Romans to know is that the very God who loved them had also called them. The God who could do anything without the aid of anyone had actually enlisted the Romans to be His holy people.

Think about how profound this was. The Romans had opted to worship and follow other gods. Nothing else could be more sinful and disrespectful to the God of all things. In fact, God had made it crystal clear to the Israelites that He was a jealous God and would not stand for anyone having other gods before Him. By all accounts, the Roman people were only worthy of God’s wrath but instead they were extended His love, mercy, and grace. They were called to be set apart from non-believers and given the opportunity to be considered God’s holy people, to become members of God’s blessed family.

And so as he gets set to get into the body of his letter, he wants the Romans to know that grace and peace were extended to them, not only from God the Father but from the Lord Jesus Christ. Both were to factor greatly in what would follow.

Through this verse, we find Paul opening his letter with a proper greeting, one that would leave his readers wanting more. Starting tomorrow and for many messages afterwards, we’ll get into the body of Paul’s letter and the main message he wished to share with the Romans, a people loved by God who had called them to be His holy people.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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