Back when I was first feeling the call to pastoral ministry (age 15-16), my then pastor, a dear saint named Monty McWhorter, assigned me a whole host of Scripture to memorize. It included the last few verses of this week’s text, Romans 10:5-15. I still remember verse 9 in the flowing phrases of the KJV, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
Verse 9 in those days was often identified as part of the “Roman Road” to salvation, a list of verses from Romans leading a seeker from conviction of sin to the gift of God in Christ to this verse as the basis for an act of receiving Christ by speaking aloud and believing in one’s heart.
This evangelistic use of Romans 10:9, taken out of its wider context, helped fuel a widespread evangelical understanding that salvation and life in Christ was primarily an individual matter of just believing (and publicly acknolwedging that belief) in Jesus. That understanding was particularly encouraged by a superficial reading of the preceding verses 5-8. Verses 5 appears to contrast Moses in Leviticus 18:5 calling for salvation by doing the works of the law with verse 6-8 suggesting something more of a professed heart religion, i.e., faith.
But once you realize that verses 6-8 are an extended paraphrase of more words from Moses (in Deuteronomy 30:12-14), it’s not so easy to see the text as pitting Old Testament works religion against New Testament salvation through faith. Paul understands Moses in Deuteronomy 30 to be saying what he himself is saying, that the Law is in fact being done now by those who are renewed and regenerated by receiving the “word” in heart and mouth by faith in Jesus Christ. So there is a continuity with Old Testament religion rather than a disjunct.
Thus once again those who want to imagine that Paul completely eschews any notion of good works as part of salvation are hard pressed. Faith in Christ is an active, working faith. Faith is a kind of obedience, as the catch phrase of the book in Romans 1:5 and 16:26 makes clear. No, we don’t earn our salvation, but neither do we “just believe” in order to be saved. We confess that Jesus is Lord and begin to live out His lordship in our lives.
One of the ways Paul experienced Jesus’ lordship and was obedient was in his own calling to share the Gospel with the Gentiles. As a young person experiencing the first stirrings of a call to preach, I resonated with Paul’s appropriation of Isaiah 52:7 in Romans 10:15, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” It seemed a passage I might claim for myself if God was truly sending me to share the Good News as a pastor. And my heart is still stirred by that text set to Handel’s gorgeous music in his “Messiah.”
Yet that promise of beautiful feet is not exclusive to professional preachers. And the progressive questions of verse 14 and 15 are a call to every Christian to bring the good news to those who haven’t heard and have not yet had the opportunity to hear, believe, obey and live in Christ.
So feet and mouth, which we usually try to keep apart, come together here as the active means of expressing the faith which God has placed in our hearts through Christ Jesus.