01 The Power of the Gospel (Romans 1:1-17)

SPEAKER_00: So turn to chapter one of Romans. We're going to do the first 17 verses. I don't know about you, but all these changes. September seems to be a time of change. You know, it's like you get a new school year and you have new sports teams and new programs are all starting at church and there's a lot of people that seem to have moved here over the summer. And it's just seems like September, even if you're not on an academic calendar, that's when everything kind of turns over and starts again. And it's if that isn't enough. Our church has gone through tremendous change in this last year. Those of you that may not attend here, we have kind of a leadership vacuum going on. Everyone is leaving and moving on. And are moving the ones that are here in different jobs, so it's kind of confusing. This isn't, I was thinking about this and thinking about what we're going to talk about today, and it struck me that this really isn't new. This is this is life. It goes right back to, I found this quote from, if I can pronounce it, Heraclitus, who was a Greek philosopher. He wrote this about 500 BC. He said, Change alone is unchanging. And then Charles Dickens, who my daughter just had to suffer through reading this summer for her required reading, the British novelist, he said, change begets change. Nothing propagates so fast. What was rock before becomes but sand and dust. And I don't know, have you ever noticed that the kinds of things that we want to change we can't? But the things that we don't want to change seem to change anyway. So, you know, we make we go on diets and we make New Year's resolutions and we resolve, you know, I'm going to be a better wife and mother, I'm going to be a better friend, or I'm going to be more organized. And somehow that change never comes about, at least not the way we expect. And then the kinds of change that you don't want to happen, like people moving on or changing or moving away, or life changes, those we can't seem to uh stop. So we we're kind of in this dilemma where we must change, but we can't change. And the things we want to change we can't, and the things that we don't want to change change anyway. Jesus said in Matthew 18, 3, I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. So we have this word from Jesus Himself saying, You must change. And yet if you look in Jeremiah chapter 13, 23, he says, Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil. So you read that and you think, okay, Jesus says we have to change. Jeremiah says you can't. There you go. You must change, but you can't. And the question is, well, how what do we do with that? What how do we face that? And what's the answer to that? And I think the answer is Romans, or the truth of the Bible. That's the anchor we need, so that when all the world around us changes, the Word of God doesn't change, and that's what we hold on to. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to study this book this year. It is one of the best foundational kind of anchors, uh, ground your life kind of books. So today we're going to start a journey through the book of Romans, and this book will change your life. It's already changed the course of history on two continents. Um it was instrumental in Augustine's conversion to Christianity. He was reading Romans when when he says the word struck him and he believed. That was in about 386 A.D. It changed the theology of Martin Luther, who was, of course, the German monk who was studying Romans, and then that led him to the Reformation to nail his theses to the door and start the Reformation. And about 200 or so years later, in a young America, Romans was influential in John Wesley's conversion. And he, along with John Whitfield, were instrumental in what's known as the Great Awakening. So you have this great revival of the Reformation in Europe, and then 200 years later you have this evangelical revival in America, both of which were sparked by Romans. Now, not to include myself among the likes of Luther and Wesley and all those people, but Romans changed my life. It was coming to an understanding of Romans 5 through 8, but I think I really began to understand what faith was all about. I'd been a Christian about a year, and I went to a retreat where the speaker was talking on Romans 5 through 8, and I think that's I don't know how to mark my conversion because I think that was the first time I really understood, even though I'd accepted Christ about a year early. So if you study Romans, it will change your life as well. And this is the kind of change we want to make. If you haven't mastered the book of Romans, I'm going to encourage you to try that this year. Tanya said, Are you going to make us learn Romans? I said, Yes, I am, I am. And I have in your booklet, you may not have seen yet, back in the back on page 33, there is space for you to write in what each section of Romans is about. And what I'm going to encourage you to do, maybe as an individual or in your small groups, is learn Romans enough so that you can go through the theme or the outline without a Bible open in front of you. So you instead of memorizing a verse here and there, I want you to memorize, like the main point of chapter one is that we've all sinned and God has abandoned us to sin. In chapter two, his main point is that no one is justified by keeping the law. In chapter three, he anyway, I'm not going to go through it all, but that's the idea. And if it helps you to memorize a key verse, do that. So I've I've kind of gotten you started. And then for each section, I encourage you to write down what's the main point and a key verse if that helps you memorize it or remember it. And that will change your life. I heard that when I was about 20 and I didn't believe it, but I learned it anyway, and it's it really does change your life. And it's the kind of change you want. So you don't have to, but I strongly encourage you, as you go through the year, try to master it so that by the end of April or the end of March that you can go through Romans without a Bible in front of you. When Martin Luther taught Romans, he was a doctor of theology at the University of Wittenberg, and he his class met twice a week on Mondays and Fridays at 6 in the morning. And he needed three semesters to go over Romans. So he would start, he's like he started in the summer of 1515, and it wasn't until the winter of 1616 that he finished. So each semester had about 90 hours of class time. And in the first semester, he went through the chapter 3, verse 4. That's as far as it got. So we're going to go a little faster than that. Just you know, bring the sigh of relief. My goal is to lay the foundation. I want to I will be trying to hit the main points and the main themes of each chapter. I won't go into every detail. I probably won't answer all your questions, but I hope to get you started on the right path. So that you have the structure and the overall point of the book so that as you go back over the years you can fill in more and more details. So that's my goal to try to do. And I promised in all the publicity that I was not going to avoid the hard questions. I'm going to try to jump in with both feet. You know, fools rush in where angels fear over tread and all that. That's my motto. We're going to jump in with both feet and try to tackle them because the hard questions are hard, especially when we get into some of the like chapter 9 and on, but they do have answers. So let's get started. We're going to I'm just going to give you a brief introduction to the book itself because there is that is written in your booklet. You can go back and read. And there any commentary will have an introduction. And I've given you some websites that have introductions. So I'm just going to give you a little bit for here. This letter, Paul, the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to Romans around 56, 58 A.D., somewhere in the middle of the first century. He was in Corinth and he was on his third missionary journey. And it's different than the other New Testament letters that he wrote because when he wrote it, he wasn't answering any particular question or responding to any particular problem that the church was having. So unlike the Corinthian letters or Timothy, where he's addressing a particular issue or problem, he had never visited Rome. He was writing to them cold, if you will. So his purpose in the letter was to start at the beginning and lay out, here's my gospel, here's the message I'm preaching to you. Without, so he had no assumptions that they had heard him before or knew or had any background. So it's one of the best letters for us in that sense because he doesn't assume prior knowledge. At the point he's writing, he had not yet visited Rome, and he hoped to go and teach the Roman Church. He was planning another journey and was hoping to go through Rome and then as far west as Spain, but he never quite made that. He dictated this letter through his friend Tertius, and his purpose was to prepare the Romans for his visit. Then tucked away in the first chapter are two verses, which are really the theme of the entire book. And that's what I'm going to look at in detail today. We will go back and pull in the introductory material, but I'm going to focus on verses 16 and 17 of chapter 1. And that and this really, I think, is the theme of the book. He says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, but the righteous man shall live by faith. There are four phrases in there I want to make sure you understand today. The first one, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. That's kind of a funny thing to say. Why would you be ashamed of the gospel? And it's such great news. Why would you be ashamed? The second phrase in there, for it is the power of God for salvation. Okay, what does that mean? Why would that be important to us? To everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek, what are the implications of that? Why not just say it's available to everyone? And then the last phrase, the righteous shall live by faith. That verse is from Habakkuk. It's the most often, most it's the Old Testament verse that is most frequently quoted in the New Testament. We're going to look at that. Okay, so I'm not ashamed of the gospel. That the first time I read that, that really struck me because it would never occur to me to be ashamed of good news. I mean, why would you think that Paul would even have to make that point? You you can see why he'd be ashamed of bad news or you know be hesitant to share it, but why would it occur to you announce that you're not ashamed of good news? So let me give you an analogy. Suppose that our beloved senior pastor who is leaving us and he's about to start a new type of ministry in England. Imagine he goes over there, and after he gets there, he's Brandon a fanatic, a heretic, he stirs up all kinds of riots and all kinds of trouble, and he lands himself in jail. And his name is splashed all over the British tabloids. Can you believe this guy? Now, how many of us are going to go, that's my pastor? I know him. I sat under his teaching for twelve years. You know, we would most likely be a little ashamed to claim him as our own. Um and that may seem far fets, especially for those of you who know our pastor, it's probably not too likely. Don't tell him I said Daniel. But it happened to Timothy. Um, Timothy, you know, was a young, younger um disciple of Paul's, and he became a pastor at Ephesus, and Paul was his mentor. So at one point in um 2 Timothy 1.8, Paul writes this Timothy, and he says, Do not be ashamed of the testimony of the Lord or of me his prisoner. So Timothy was in the position of having to say, well, you know, my mentor, the the man that taught me everything, I know he's in a Roman prison right now. Um he's under arrest, everybody thinks he's a fanatic. You'd be kind of ashamed to admit that. You're not sure you want to associate. There's an embarrassment with that. So one reason he may say that is because we'd be tempted to be ashamed of the messenger. The other thing, the other reason he might say that is we might be attempted tempted to be ashamed of the message. The message, the content itself. Now, a lot of you are probably too young to have seen this, the 1977 movie, Oh God, did anybody ever see that? Mind the only one old enough to have seen that movie. It's it's not a real great movie, but it's kind of funny. In that movie, George Burns, who's God in the form of George Burns, appears to the average guy who's played by John Denver, and he says, I have a message and I want you to tell everybody on earth the message. And the message is everything on earth will work if you just want it to. And understandably, the John Denver character is a little reluctant to go on TV and spread that message. He's like, People are gonna laugh at me, and they do, and they should, probably. That's a pretty stupid message. Um But that's a case where you might you're ashamed of the content of the message. And what Paul's starting out with is saying the gospel is not like that. You he's not ashamed of the gospel because it's true, it's valuable, and it comes from an authoritative spokesman. Both the message and the messenger are reliable. You can trust them. So let's go back to verses one through seven and look at how he introduces himself. It says, Paul, a bondservant of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets and the holy scriptures, concerning his son, who was born a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of Holiness, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for his name's sake, among whom you also were called, are the called of Jesus Christ, to all who are beloved of God in Rome, called as saints, grace to you and peace from God the Father, God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. That's a pretty typical greeting for a letter, but notice what he says. He starts with his credentials. He says, I'm a bondservant of Jesus Christ. I've been called as an apostle, I've been set apart for the gospel. So the first thing he tells us is, You can trust me, I'm a reliable messenger, the immediate messenger in this case. You can trust him. He's not a hypocrite, he's not proclaiming himself. And then he tells you, you can trust the message. This message was validated by the Old Testament prophets. This goes back to the beginning. Um, it was promised beforehand through his prophets. He was the Messiah would come and be a descendant. All that was fulfilled, so there's an ancient testimony to this message. And then he tells us the content of the message, Jesus Christ, is also reliable. His identity was validated by the resurrection from the dead. So you can trust that Jesus is who he says he was, or he says he is, because of the empty tomb. So he starts out saying, Look, the gospel is not like those other messages. You don't have any reason to be ashamed because the message is reliable, the messenger, it's been validated by Old Testament prophets. You can trust me. So that's our starting point. You can listen to Paul, he's worth hearing because what he says from comes from God, he's uniquely appointed by him, and his message concerns Jesus Christ, who was proved to be the Son of God, proved to be the Messiah by the empty tune, validated by the prophets. So he says, I'm not ashamed. We have a very reliable message to stand on. Let's look at the second phrase then. For the for it is the power of God for salvation. So he's talking about the gospel, is the power of God for salvation. The the promise of the gospel is basically the power to change, and it's the kind of change we want. You know, we live in a self-esteem culture where the prevailing viewpoint seems to be everyone is special, everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. You know, we don't want to keep score because somebody might feel bad, uh and no one's really better than anyone else. And if you judge someone else's uh opinions or their religion or their ideas, then you're engaging in hate speech, you can't do that. And the goal of education seems to be making people feel good about themselves. So along comes the gospel message, and it's Christianity comes along and says, you know what? You're a wretch. And not only that, you're worse off than you think. And you know what? If you dig down way deep inside, you're still a wretch. It doesn't get any better. So left to yourself, there's absolutely nothing you can do to change. The harder you try, the worse it's gonna get. So we have this conflict. It's no wonder that our culture is is uh suspicious and hostile to Christianity. We're flying directly in the face of the self-esteem culture because the message of the gospel starts with you need help. It doesn't matter who you are, you're not good enough. Um and you have to get people to admit they have a problem. And that's the first two chapters we're going to be spending all on that message. But what Paul does is saying here is the gospel alone supplies the power to change. Everyone, if you notice also in our self-esteem culture, everyone's a victim. You everyone has a label too. Every phobia, every uh problem we have, we're relieved of all responsibility because we can label it. You know, addiction is genetic and abusive behavior is just something I learned. And if you struggle with aggression or depression or antisocial behavior, it's not my fault. It was, you know, I came from a dysfunctional family, and we have labels for everything. We can find we can go to any kind of counselor, and all our problems will be fully explained and categorized and described, and then they're all the results of our genetics and our families, our flawed learning, uh poor public schools, and your mother, right? All in all, it comes back to that. Um it's always your mother's fault, which is not good news for us because we're gonna be the problem or the cause of our children's problems. But if you notice, all that analysis doesn't change anything. I mean, if you tell me that, okay, the problems in my marriage stem from the flawed patterns I learned from my parents, or um I didn't have proper role models, so I'm not I lack the parenting skills I need, that may be true, but I'm still a bad parent. Whatever label you slap on it, the problem is still there. Uh and I don't think this is unique. Other generations experience the same thing. When Sigmund Freud first began to talk about all his psychoanalysis and the unseen forces, he was embraced around the world and everybody said, Yeah, that's me. I I recognize that. He's explaining all the things that have gone wrong in my life, and yet nothing changed. Um Karl Marx later then explained it all with economic class struggles and the oppression of the working class. And people said, Yeah, that explains it. I'm poor because the class of people I'm a member of has been oppressed, and um nothing changed. And closer to our generation, I think the lot is true with feminist thought. In some ways, a lot of the feminists correctly analyzed the problems between men and women, but they ultimately had no solution, nothing changed. And all the analysis by itself is not powerful, it doesn't change us. Just as an aside, I think that's one of the reasons why rap music is is as popular as it is. It correctly, in some ways, describes a tragic and um culture that people are living in, and they relate to it because it gives a voice to the rage and the anger and the depression they're feeling, but in the end it doesn't change anything. And what Paul's saying is the gospel is the power to change. The power it is the power of God for salvation. So what is unique about Christianity is you must change. Left to yourself, you can't change, but God has promised to change you. It's the only religion that says that. Every other religion, if you get down to their final, what's the bottom line, it's try harder. Christianity says you don't have to try harder, God is gonna do it for you. All you have to do is believe. So God will change what's inside us, He will grant us His power so that we become the kind of people we ultimately want to be. And that's what the what that's what the Gospel's all about. Now, it's not gonna happen overnight, it's a process, it's not shallow, it's not done quickly, there, but there is growth, and there's genuine power to change in the gospel. So he's not ashamed of the gospel because the message is reliable, the messenger is reliable, and it is truly the power to change what we need to change. Going on then, to everyone who believes, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. His point here basically is it is everybody. But he there is an order to salvation. If you look back at verse 14, he says, I'm under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish, and by that he means the educated and the uneducated by Greeks and barbarians. And he basically means everybody. The ancient city of Rome was this unbelievable kind of stew of races, slaves, free, all cultures, all languages, people from everywhere came to Rome. That's why we get the saying, all roads lead to Rome. It wasn't just the system that they built, but that it was like a magnet, similar maybe to New York today, in which all people of all races come and end up in this city. And in verses 8 through 14 of Romans, Paul's saying he can't wait to come to Rome. He wants to be part of what God's doing in the church there and to bring a blessing to them and to receive a blessing. And he knows that that church is made up of every kind of person. And his point here is basically the gospel is available to everyone, regardless. Now, it's interesting that again in our culture, we're kind of our culture is bent on erasing the differences between people, between genders, between ethnic groups, and our school systems champion this kind of multiculturalism, saying everybody's as good as everybody else, every culture, every work of art, every history, every memory, every place we ought to celebrate equal as equally wonderful. And in the end, I think that effort will fail. There is a basis on which we find common ground, but the common ground is not we're all equally wonderful. The common ground is we're all equally sinful. We're all equally desperate for God's love, and we have no other place to turn. So in the church, you do find what I think is the white multiculturalism, where the barriers that separate us of race and ethnic background and social class and whatever can be broken down, but they're broken down on the basis that we all need salvation. We all need the gospel. We are all powerless to change left to ourselves. Not that we're all equally wonderful. Now, we do need to be careful. He is saying there's an order to salvation. It begins with the Jews, and in that there's a sense that not every religion is equal to every other religion. There was a thread through history in which God made himself known. And he made himself known through the line of Abraham and his people. And the laws were given to them, the Savior came from them. He's going to go on when we get into later chapters to talk about the advantages and the privileges they have. But the point he's going to make is they are no better off. Yes, God used them in a special way, but they need salvation just like everyone else. So it's not a basis for pride, it's a basis for humility. God gave me a role to play. It was a unique and special role. But I'm in the same need of everyone else. I have the same hope, the same gospel, and the same savior, and the same need for grace. Okay. The last verse then, the fourth phrase I want to look at, is the righteous shall live by faith. And essentially the point he's making here is the gospel is a gift from God. So this whole message that God will change you, where you can't change yourself, is that this is a gift. It cannot be earned, it's not deserved. It's not based on how qualified you are, what you look like, how old you are, how young you are, how much education you have, how much money you have, what your family background is, your history, uh, how accomplished you are, it doesn't matter. The gospel is a choice of faith, and it's granted to all who believe. And he we're going to spend a lot more time on that when we get into chapter 4 and chapter 5. So if you have more questions, that's coming. But I think for now the point he's making is it's available to everyone and it's available on the basis of faith. So whatever you are on the outside, it doesn't matter. It's the inside where God will begin his work. And I believe this is a promise, not a commandment. He's promising that the gospel is available to those who have the gift of faith. So he says, you must change. Left to yourself, you can't change. But here's the answer: the gospel is the power to change. So when Jesus tells us, I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven, he's right. We have to change. And when Jeremiah says, Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil, he's right. Left to ourselves we can't change. But the glorious good news of the gospel that Paul's going to spend the next basically 15 chapters explaining and announcing is there is a power that will bring about that change, and it's in the gospel, and it's a gift of God. So the change we must make, that we pray for, that we long for, it's not something we have to muster up, it's not something we have to earn or we have to prove or make ourselves worthy, it's a gift of God. And that's the anchor we're looking for. I think that's what gets you through all the changes in all your seasons of life. It gets us through the changes in our church that we're facing, it's the walk on which we stand. It's the gospel that was predicted by the prophets, uh, tested by history, and given an authoritative spokesman. So I pray as we go through Romans that it will change your life in the best way, from the inside out, the way God changes us by writing the law in our hearts. So next week we're gonna pick up in verse 18, and I have to warn you, Paul's gonna spend about three chapters on the bad news before we get to the good news. So come back. But the first few weeks it's gonna, we're gonna hit, yes, you're a wretch, and there's nothing you can do about it. And he's gonna hit that home from a whole bunch of different angles. But the good news is coming. We will get to that, and we're gonna slow down when we get to the good news chapters. So we're gonna go through one through four fairly quickly. Then when we get into five through eight, we're gonna slow down a little because there's so much in those chapters, it's hard to take all in one uh one lecture. So let me just pray, and then um I was didn't want to promise that we'd be done early today, but I figured we might. So but just in case, I wasn't gonna announce that, but we are, so Merry Christmas. So let me just pray to close this. Father, thank you that um you're a God who loves us and cares for us, and that you give us the power to change when we can't change ourselves. And we pray that as we go through this year together, that you would be growing us into a community who loves you and knows you, that we can encourage each other, shoulder each other's burdens, learn and grow from each other as we go through this year. That your hand would be on all aspects of this study, from the classes and the children in the nursery to the small groups to the lecture. We pray that um your gracious favor would turn on our humble Bible study and that all knowledge would be increased among us, all good learning flourish and abound through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.