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Romans the 15th chapter, I begin at the verse numbered 14. I myself am satisfied about you my brethren that you yourselves are full of goodness filled with all knowledge and able to instruct one another, but on some points I have written to you very boldly by way of reminder because of the grace given me

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by God to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God so that the offerings of the Gentiles may be acceptable and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. In Christ Jesus then I have reason to be proud of my work for God for I will not venture to speak of

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anything except what Christ has wrought through me to win obedience from the Gentiles by word and deed by the power of signs and wonders by the power of the Holy Spirit so that from Jerusalem and as far around as Illyrium I have fully preached the gospel of Christ thus making it my ambition to preach the

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gospel not where Christ has already been named lest I build on another man's foundation but as it is written they shall see who have never seen been told of him and they shall understand who have never heard of him. This is the reason why I have so often been hindered in coming to you but now since I no

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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 sped on my journey there by you once I have enjoyed your company for a little. At present however I'm going to Jerusalem with aid for the Saints for

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Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the Saints at Jerusalem they were pleased to do it and indeed they are in debt 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.

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When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been raised I shall go on by way of you to Spain and I know that when I come to you I shall come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. One of the roads that

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Christians walk is the road to Spain. It is the road that is never successfully traveled to its end. It is the goal or the objective that is never fully achieved. It was Paul's great desire explained in this passage to preach the gospel everywhere the great passion of his heart was to bring people to a

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knowledge of Jesus Christ and he traveled and was successful in his ministry in all of the major cities of the eastern Mediterranean but by the year 60 AD there were no major cities left and so he decided to go where no one at least with the missionary credentials which were his had gone

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before. He decided that he would like to carry the gospel to Rome the capital of the Empire and then beyond that to Spain which was the most distant outpost of the Roman Empire in that time. Paul's thinking of course is obvious if I can win the capital city then perhaps I can win the Empire. If I can carry the gospel

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to the very edge of the world to Spain then perhaps I can win the world for my Lord Jesus Christ. There was of course another reason why Paul was interested in going to Spain and that was at that particular time Spain was ablaze with a special genius. Lucan the poet was writing, Marshall the master of epigram

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had his pen to paper, Quintilian the great Spanish orator was known throughout the Empire and Seneca who was at first the guardian and then the Secretary of State of Nero was also a Spaniard and was a person of great influence. Spain was seen then as an exotic place and it was in Paul's heart

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to touch and win Spain to bring it to the feet of Jesus Christ. So he writes to the Romans "I hope to see you as I go to Spain to be sped on my journey there by you once I have enjoyed your company a little." This was the expression of his dream. But Paul never got to Spain. As you know he was taken to Rome in chains and

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he died in that city beheaded for the sake of his Savior. He never saw Spain the goal toward which he had set himself. You might say he never got the opportunity to build his castles in Spain. I'm sure you've heard that phrase "castles in Spain" it is used to refer in the common phraseology of our society to

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goals that are not reached. That phrase comes to us from the writings of a man named Jean de Meun. He wrote about 700 years ago and his major work was a long poem called "The Romance of the Rose" which is lost to us we no longer have it but there are two lines from that poem which continue in the literature of our

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day and those lines are "Thou shalt make castles then in Spain and dream of joy but all in vain." Castles in Spain are the castles we dream about but never build. They represent unfulfilled dreams, hopes that do not come to fruition. We've all had them just as Paul. On the shoreline of every human experience there are the

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wrecks of the ships we have set sail and have never made port and the sea lanes to our own spanes of the spirit are littered with our broken hopes and dreams. I have only been in this pulpit for one year and yet in that length of time many of you have permitted me to walk into the secret places of your

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lives and I know of broken dreams and of shattered hopes. Just this morning following the morning worship service two mothers spoke to me. One mother spoke to me of the death of her son four years ago. The other mother spoke to me of her son who is right now in the hospital and is very near death from a

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serious stroke. I could tell as I talked to both of these mothers how in their sons were their hopes and their dreams. One has already lost her son the other feels that she is about to lose hers. So all of us have Spanish experiences. Now why is it that our journeys to these places sometimes end in despair? Why don't

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we get to Spain and build our castles there? Well sometimes it's because of our sin. Sometimes we cripple our things by the things that we do and limit ourselves by the things that we do. Did you hear about the man who was hired to paint his church? There had been a squabble between the session and the

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trustees. The session said the place needed to be painted and the trustees said there was no money so this man volunteered to take on the task. He painted one side of the church quite successfully, so successfully that he thought he could water the paint down a bit before he painted the second side

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and he did that and it still looked alright so he watered the paint more and painted the third side and then he watered it down even more and painted the fourth side. Everything looked fine and everyone was pleased to the church until it rained and when it rained all of the watered down paint ran down onto

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the ground and it is said that as the man stood there looking at what had happened a voice spoke to him out of heaven and said "repaint and thin no more." Well it's a bad joke but it's a good point and the point is that many times the things that come upon us in life are the results of our own sin. Yesterday on

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a college campus not far from here a student lamented to me the fact that he was not getting many job offers. He is on the edge of being graduated. When I ask him about his grades he had to report to me in honesty that he had not applied himself and that his marks were not impressive. His own sin you see is making

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it hard to get to Spain. Sometimes we do not get to Spain because we throw ourselves against the laws of nature. They were trying to hire a bell ringer for the Cathedral of Notre Dame and they invited a man to come to the top of the tower and they had rather unusual standards in that tower at that time. The

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hunchback of Notre Dame was still presiding and his instruction was that you were supposed to ring the bell by striking the bell with the side of your head. So what he said to the candidate was "I want you to stand right here. I will move to one side, pull back the clapper, I will let the clapper go and

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when the clapper comes beside you you will hit it with the side of your head and ring the bell. We'll see how you do." And so the hunchback pulled back the clapper and let it go and just when the clapper got to his side of his head this man turned and looked straight at it and it hit him right in the face. Well the

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hunchback explained to him that this was not the way he was supposed to do it. You are to hit it with the side of your head. I'll pull it off to one side and let it go and when it comes you hit it with the side of your head. And once again he pulled it back and once again he let it go and once again just when the clapper

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got up beside this fellow he turned and looked at it and it hit him right in the face. This time it hit him so hard it knocked him over and out of the top of the tower and he fell according to the story to the pavement far below. The hunchback ran down and met the assembled crowd there. Someone said "Does anybody

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know him?" and the hunchback looking at him said "Well I don't know his name but his face rings a bell." But the fact is you're not supposed to ring bells with your face. The fact is when you throw yourself against the forces of nature you come to destruction. If you for example insist upon burning the candle

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at both ends, going against the counsel of those who have your best interests at heart, if you fly in the face of good instructions for health and self preservation, that's going against the bell. That's hitting against the hammer. That's trying to break the laws of nature. You will not break them. You break

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yourself against them. And that's sometimes the reason we don't get to Spain. Another reason why we do not get to Spain is our membership in one another. The fact that we are so attached to each other in so many ways. There was a man in the hospital who was the winner of the state lottery. He'd won over a

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million dollars but his family was afraid to tell him of this because they thought that his weakened heart would be under such strain that he might die from the news. Now this man's closest friend was his pastor and so they asked the pastor if he would go and tell him what had happened. So the minister went into

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the room, engaged him in conversation for quite some time, gradually brought the subject up in this way. He said, "Joe, if you were to win the lottery, if you were to win a million and a half dollars, what would you do with it?" And the old fellow looked at him for a moment and he said, "Well, the first thing I would do would be

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to give one half of it to the church." Whereupon the minister had a heart attack and dropped it. Now here are two people whose lives are so intertwined and so tangled that the impact and expression of one had immediate effect upon the other. Yesterday I united a young man and a young woman in holy

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matrimony. I said to them, "Do you realize that today you are doubling your capacity to be hurt? As long as you love only yourself, then only what hurts you will hurt you. But as soon as you add someone to the circle of your love, then what hurts them hurts you. And as others enter the circle of your love, you

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increase again and again and again your capacity to be hurt. We are tied to each other by the filaments of affection and love, and because that is so, what impacts upon others impacts upon us. And sometimes we never reach our hopes or our dreams because of what happens to those who love and those we love.

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There's another reason we don't reach Spain, and that is the fact that God is impartial. The fact that he does not lay aside his ordered universe to suit our particular caprice. There was a religion professor on a particular campus who'd been there many years, and he was known for the fact that his final

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examination always consisted of the same question. He always asked, "Give me a list of the kings of Israel," and described their reigns. Now the students never studied for that final examination because they knew what the last question would be. They knew they would be able to pass it with ease. They memorized the

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answer to the question and went in and always passed the course with an A. One year the old professor took sick on the very night before the exam, and one of the younger professors in the department who knew of this situation was asked to give a substitute test. He didn't have the time to write up an entire new test,

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so he just wrote one question. And the students were astonished and discouraged the next day when they walked into the classroom, and the young professor was there, not the older one they anticipated, and the question he wrote on the board was this, "List the prophets of Israel and describe which were major and which were

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minor." Now they were utterly unprepared for that question. Most of them just handed in their papers and walked out of the room in despair. One student, however, bowed his head in prayer, prayed for a long time, and then finally, when the period was almost over, began to write quite feverishly and handed in his paper.

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The young professor was very interested to know what this last student had written, so as soon as the paper was handed in, he picked it up and read it, and it said, "Dear professor, far be it from me to say which of God's prophets were major and which of his prophets were minor, but if you would like a list

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of the kings of Israel and their reigns, here it is." Now we might say, "Why didn't God answer the young man's fervent prayer?" For this reason, if he had answered that prayer, then all of the students in that class would have quickly gotten religion and all for the wrong reason. If God responded to the petitions of each

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individual in accordance with whatever they desired, people would go to religion and go to God to make him into some kind of celestial bellhop, ready to move in response to their every query and request. Religion would become some kind of cosmic insurance policy, and people would believe only for prudential

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reasons. These then are the reasons that we often do not get to Spain. Our sin, the inevitability of God's natural law, the way in which we are tied to one another, and the impartiality of God's judgment and dealing with his children. But what I would ask you to remember tonight is not so much why we do not get to Spain as

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this, that God builds castles in Spain also. And God's castles, or God's Spanish adventures, if you will, are within our hearts and minds. In other words, what God wants to see growing within us is faith and hope and trust and confidence and courage. You see, God does not want us to be defeated by any of those things which

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I have just outlined. We are defeated by them because of our sin and our weakness and the other things which I indicated. God does not will these things. He does not choose that we should fail. Instead, he wills that we should have growing within us a sufficient strength and integrity and confidence in him, that

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when we encounter these circumstances, we will be able to rise above them. See, God wants us, his Spanish hopes, if you will, are for us to lift our eyes to higher values and purposes. I knew a funeral director in a distant city who had a young daughter, four years old, and she took sick. She took sick while he was out

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of town. The mother nursed the child as best she could and then thought it best to call the doctor. The doctor came, treated the child, not particularly alarmed by the circumstance, put the child to bed, and said that the mother should take the temperature in the morning and call him. And somehow during

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the night, in one of those strange dispensations of disease which no one understands, the child died. When the father came home, he blamed the doctor. There was no evidence that the doctor should be blamed. It was one of those things which to this very day is beyond our understanding. But this man never

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ceased blaming that doctor. Now, I was serving a church in that community and the people in that church many times used the service of that funeral director. And there was never any time when I was with that man, either in his establishment or riding with him in his car to the cemetery or coming back, there

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was never any time I can remember in which he did not bring that up, in which he did not speak to me of the heartbreak of his loss and of what he considered to be the terrible sin of the doctor. He focused everything you see on Spain. He couldn't get beyond Spain. He saw what happened in that tragedy not as one

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experience in life, but as the final experience of life. He kept shedding tears over Spain and never lifted up his eyes to the God who said, "I will give you what you need, even when you don't get to Spain." I think it interesting to observe that God is ready to speak to us beyond the tragic experiences of our lives if we

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will only let him build new Spains in our spirits. There was a man named Charles who was trying to learn how to take the gooeyness out of rubber and to give it a hard surface that would wear. And he tried experiment after experiment after experiment and he failed and he failed and he failed. And then one night

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utterly exhausted, having smeared some chemicals on a piece of rubber, he set it down and fell asleep. Unfortunately, he set it down too close to a furnace. And the heat of the furnace began to heat the rubber and the rubber began to smoke and to burn and the smell awakened him. And he managed to pull it away before the

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place was burned down and when he examined the rubber he discovered that exactly the thing he'd been hoping for had happened. His name of course was Charles Goodyear and the process was vulcanization. Now here was a man you see who had given up and yet out of what happened afterwards came the very thing

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he was seeking. Or I think of that sculptor who took a great perfect block of marble and began to work on it and so disfigured it and marred it that he finally took it back to the marble yard and it sat in that marble yard for 300 years with no one touching it because it was so marred and marked. And then a

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young sculptor named Michelangelo came along and he looked at this broken thing all he could afford and taking that piece of marble and beginning to work on it he carved out of it David, one of the great sculptors of history, 19 feet tall it stands, a magnificent representation of the young shepherd. You see if you

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look at things properly, if you open yourself to the possibility, if you lift up your eyes, if you allow some hope and some courage and some confidence in God and some of the gift of adventure which its spirit gives to get into you then you can do things that you might not otherwise imagine. That's exactly what

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happened to Paul. It's true he did not get to Spain. He spent his time the rest of his life in jail in Rome. But you see because his eyes were lifted higher because he didn't weep over that outpost but instead focused upon the Spain's God was ready to build in him, he won his very guards. He converted them to Christ.

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He won members of Caesar's household so that finally he writes out of prison in Rome, "I have learned in whatsoever situation I am therein to be content." He'd found a Spain of the Spirit you see. For all of us the future is uncertain. We have great hopes and dreams, some of them we will meet, some of them we will not.

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What is important is not that we lose some of our journeys and that we sometimes fail to make the ports toward which we're headed. It's really not finally important that we lose the foothills as long as we hold on to the heights, as long as we realize what we can do beyond Spain if we allow the

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purposes of God to be fulfilled in our hearts. We know not what the future hath of marvel or surprise, assured alone that life and death has many certainties and his mercy underlies. We know not where his islands lift their fronded palms in air. We only know we cannot drift beyond his love and care. So let us

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plan our journeys and let us dream our dreams and those we plan and dream with God in his good time will come true. Let us pray. Oh God in our experience of thee we know difficult times. Please father in our moments of discouragement and despair lift up our eyes to the heights. Help us

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to see what you're building in our spirits and seeing that to go on not perhaps where we first wish to go but where in the end it will be best for us to go. Trusting and believing that for Christians all things work together for good. And the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father and

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the communion of the Holy Spirit the Comforter be and abide with you both now and forevermore. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]