If you talk to Carla or Will or Clinton or a bunch of other people here about the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, you will see their eyes light up. They get quite excited about football and their favorite team.
One day this summer, we met someone we hadn’t met before and began to talk with them about canoeing. You should have seen their eyes light up, or was that my eyes, anyway, we had a fun conversation about something we both enjoyed.
I have had conversations with people in this congregation about quilting, horses, Mustang cars, old tractors, flower gardens and many other thing and I am beginning to get a pretty good idea of what makes your eyes light up.
This morning, we are going to begin a series of messages on Romans. My brother-in-law attends the church where John Piper preaches and he told me that Piper had had his final message on Romans some time this spring – after 16 years in the book. I don’t intend to preach that long on it, but hope that we will get some understanding of it’s theological richness in the next 7 or 8 months.
Today, as we look at Romans 1:1-18, we will be introduced to some of the main themes in the book. In this section, the apostle Paul was making a connection with the people of the church in Rome, because he had never met them before. As we read this introduction, we will very quickly see what his passion was, what made his eyes light up. Over and over Paul speaks about the gospel and as he does so, we get a wonderful view of the amazing thing that God has done through it. As we examine the gospel, I hope that even though other things may still make our eyes light up, we will have such an appreciation for the gospel that it, more than anything else, will be what we truly love.
When we know a person’s story, we often get a better idea of what makes them tick. For example, when we know that Frank & Marge Kroeker were missionaries in Paraguay for many years and that they have children living there, we understand why they drink Matte, why they continue to have a passion about Paraguay and why they love to go there.
What made Paul tick? What background brought him to the place of having such a passion for the gospel. The first 15 verses of Romans 1 give us an understanding of this.
One of the things we notice is that Paul had experienced God’s grace. Please look at Romans 1:5 which says, “Through him and for his names sake, we received grace…” Paul was a person who had a powerful perception of what it meant that he had experienced the grace of God. We know only a few things about his background and growing up, but something about his personality or upbringing must have made him a very passionate person. Perceiving that the name of Jesus was having a huge impact on people and believing that it was false teaching, he gave all his energy to stamping out Christianity and destroying those who belonged to Jesus. He was a persecutor of the church. One day, Jesus stopped him on the road to Damascus when he was on his way to arrest more Christians and showed him that he was truly Messiah and that Paul was wrong in his assumptions. Paul accepted this confrontation and was forgiven. He never forgot the powerful change that came into his life as a result of the gospel. He had been a murderer, a God rejecter and a blasphemer, but he was shown grace and forgiveness and was accepted by God. The powerful change that had taken place in his life impacted him in an amazing way so that he deeply grasped what God had done through the gospel and was eternally grateful for it.
Romans 1:5 goes on to say, “Through him and for his names sake, we received…apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith.” This tells us that Paul’s passion for the gospel also arose out of his desire to make the name of Jesus known among all the Gentiles. It was this call which made him interested in going to Rome as well. He had not planted the church in Rome, in fact he had never been to Rome. However, he was concerned about all the churches of Jesus Christ. He knew there were believers there because he had heard about their faith, as he says in 8. He also knew what kind of a church it was. He knew that it was made up of Jewish Christians and those from a Gentile background. He knew that this combination was subject to all kinds of problems and he had probably heard about those problems. He had prayed for them, as he indicates in verses 9, 10. All of these things – his passion to preach the gospel to Jews and Gentiles and his concern for all the churches of Jesus Christ gave him a powerful desire to visit the church in Rome as well. Four times – in verses 10, 11, 13 & 15 – he mentions his desire to go to the church in Rome. Why did he have this great desire? We read in verse 15, “I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome.” We see that the call which defined his life, that is, his passion for the gospel, was what made him want to go to Rome as well and share something with them, but also be blessed by the people in Rome. So we see that Paul’s passion for the gospel arose out of his call and defined the direction of his life.
The Center Of Paul’s Heart – The Gospel
The first thing we have seen is that Paul had a commitment to the gospel because of his own personal experience of the gospel and because of his call to proclaim the gospel. But that was Paul’s personal experience. Carla once took a group of girls on a trail ride, on horses, in the Pembina Valley. The horse she was given was a strong willed horse and gave her no end of trouble, in fact it was quite a scary experience. Needless to say she has a passion about horses, but it is a rather negative passion. Our personal experiences will give us personal passions. As we read on in Romans we find that Paul’s passion for the gospel was not only because of his personal experiences with it. In this passage, he also gives objective reasons why the gospel was at the center of his heart. Because of these reasons this passion for the gospel is not only Paul’s experience, but can also be our experience.
The key verses for this book are 1:16-18. These verses actually provide an outline for Romans. In them, Paul gives three reasons why he loves the gospel. These three reasons form the outline for the rest of the book, in reverse order. First of all he loves the gospel because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes both Jews and Gentiles. He deals with this matter of the power of the gospel for the salvation of everyone in Romans 5:1 to the end of the book. The second reason is, as he says in 1:17, “in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed that is from faith to faith.” He talks about this in Romans 3:21 to 4:25. The third reason he loves the gospel is because in it “the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men…” This idea is developed in Romans 1:18-3:20. I will be talking in more detail about each of these three reasons in the weeks to come and exploring all that they mean for us. This morning, however, I would like to look at five reasons why Paul loves the gospel which appear in Romans 1:1-18. They are objective reasons and give us encouragement to also love the gospel.
The first reason that Paul gives as to why he loves the gospel is because it fulfills God’s promises. Please look at Romans 1:2 which says, “the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures…”
Jewish people today have the idea that although Christianity arose out of Judaism, it is a new direction away from God’s word. Paul believed this until he met Jesus. The fact that a Pharisee and a Biblical scholar recognized that Jesus was God’s Messiah and a fulfillment of all that God has promised is amazing. It helps us understand that there is a massive history behind the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a history which extends to the beginning of God’s relationship with human beings and permeates everything that God has communicated to people.
Not only do we have confidence because the gospel of Jesus is solidly anchored in all that God has ever spoken to His people, it also shows us something of the faithfulness of God. God promised the gospel long ago and he has kept his promise.
Don’t you love the gospel when you know that it was God’s plan all along and when you understand that God promised it and it has come to pass in Jesus?
It Reveals God’s Righteousness And His Wrath
Another reason why Paul loves the gospel and why we can love the gospel is that given in Romans 1:17,18, which says that it reveals the righteousness of God and the wrath of God. In the next two messages, I want to develop what this means and how powerful it is. For today, I would just like to briefly make mention of the power of this statement.
Righteousness has to do with making things right. The gospel makes us right with God, (Romans 5:8, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us) it makes us into people who do right ( II Corinthians 5:17, “if anyone is in Christ he is a new creature…” and it will make the world into a place in which right is done( Revelation 21:27, “nothing impure will ever enter it.”) That is good news! Don’t you want to be a part of a world that is right?
On the other hand, verse 18 says that the gospel reveals the wrath of God. When we live in a world of Osama bin Laden, Idi Amin, drug lords and Hell’s Angels, we long for someone who will pour out his wrath against all wickedness in a just way. It is wonderful to know that evil will be destroyed and that good will prevail. This is what the gospel of God reveals in the most simple terms. What wonderful good news that is! No wonder we love the gospel!
Another phrase in this section that reveals the wonder of the gospel is that it is powerful. God is a powerful God. He has demonstrated His power many times in history. As we look around in our world and read the story of what God has done, we are often impressed with His power.
This week I spoke with a farmer who loves to walk in the field when the new plants are emerging from the ground. As we talked, I could tell that watching plants grow was a worship experience for him. Who of us has not recognized with deep awe the amazing power of God displayed in all of the created world.
For Israel, the greatest demonstration of the power of God was the exodus out of Egypt. Whenever I read this story of a whole nation, in slavery leaving and even defeating their captors, I am amazed. I am reading the autobiography of Nelson Mandela. He was the African who was deeply involved in dismantling Apartheid in South Africa. It took years and left many scars on all involved. His book is entitled, “Long Walk to Freedom” and it certainly was a long walk. When we contrast that with the powerful deliverance of God which occurred for the people of Israel, we have to recognize that God’s power was mightily at work.
For Christians, the greatest demonstration of the power of God is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Our whole being and all of life’s experiences tell us that dead people do not come to life again. Yet, Jesus did and it has changed our whole outlook.
We often look to that day when Jesus will return to restore all things and see it as the next big powerful thing that God will do, but the gospel which, like leaven hidden in a lump of dough is slowly changing people and nations today is as powerfully active as creation and the exodus and the resurrection and the second coming. The gospel is powerful to transform lives, to transform people and in the end, the gospel will be powerful enough to completely transform the entire universe when Jesus comes back again.
Paul was committed to the gospel because he knew that it was powerful! I am looking forward to examining much of the rest of Romans to see how the power of the gospel can transform and is transforming us! We will see that due to our weakness, the law was unable to save us from sin and death. It is only the new birth, the gospel, which comes from Jesus, which is powerful enough to save us from the power of sin. We will see the power of the gospel which is transforming people from all nations into Christ-likeness. We will see the power of the gospel which by the Holy Spirit is making all things new.
John E. Toews puts it this way, the gospel, “unleashes God’s end-time power in history to effect salvation.”
Paul began this section by saying, “I am not ashamed of the gospel…” When we look at this, we need to understand that we do not look at it with the same understanding as Paul did. Our understanding of this is something like, “I am not going to be afraid to tell others about Jesus even though they might laugh at me.” Is that what Paul meant or is that what we read into the text?
In July, at the EMC conference, the speaker, Arley Loewen, talked about the Muslim society as an “honor/shame” society. We live in a truth/justice society. The two perspectives are very different. In our society, it is wrong to lie. In a Muslim society, it is a much greater wrong to be unfriendly. So, for example, Arley explained that if you are invited to dinner, you always say that you are coming, even if you know you are not because to refuse an invitation would be to shame the other person. This is one aspect of how an honor/shame society works. The Biblical world was an honor/shame society.
Since Paul was speaking out of such a context, what did he mean when he said that he was not ashamed of the gospel? As we read on, in this verse, we read that he was not ashamed because the gospel was the power of God for Jews and Gentiles. We live in a society in which everyone is treated equally. In that society, masters were above slaves, Greeks were above Jews and it was a matter of shame to violate the social order. In the church in Rome there were Jewish believers and Gentile believers. There were masters and slaves. The church was deeply divided on theological and cultural grounds. Jewish believers thought that people had to be Jewish before they could become Christian. Gentile believers realized that this was not so and that they could become Christians simply by faith. They looked down on the Jewish Christians believing that they were missing the point of the gospel. When Paul mentions “Greeks and non-Greeks…wise and foolish…” he is alluding to another social division in the church. In their society, all of these social and cultural barriers were not to be crossed. However, the gospel crossed them. The gospel made everyone equal. When he said that he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ he was affirming the wonder and glory of the gospel as a great equalizer, as something which was available to all men on the same basis. He loved the gospel because it was a gospel which was available to all people in the world on an equal basis.
The other thing that Paul loved about the gospel was that it is not a thing, not a religion, not a set of rules. Paul loved the gospel because it is centered in a person, Jesus Christ. The name of Jesus – either Jesus, Christ or Son is found 9 times in these 18 verses. Whenever Paul mentions the gospel, he mentions that the good news is about Jesus.
Paul makes confession of Jesus in 1:3,4 where he points to His divine origin, His human descent, His powerful resurrection from the dead and His current reign. The center of the gospel is Jesus. The hope of the world is Jesus. John E. Toews says “In a world where things fall apart, the center does not hold.” In that “falling apart world” Jesus is the center that does hold!
It is because of Jesus that Paul was committed to the gospel.
No wonder that Paul’s eyes light up every time he speaks about the gospel. It is truly amazing and I am looking forward to unwrapping this present from God to understand it more clearly and deeply in the next few months. Today as, I hope, we have come to appreciate this amazing gospel, the question is “How do we respond?”
The first response is that, although this gospel is a work of God through Jesus Christ, we must accept it. In verse 8, Paul speaks about the faith of the Romans. They responded to the gospel through faith. In verse 16, he indicates that the gospel is the power of God “for everyone who believes.” We do not receive this amazing gift from God without believing. Verse 17 indicates that this response that is required is a response of faithfulness to the faithfulness of God. The word used here can be translated “faith” or “faithfulness.” It is a Western concept that separates faith from faithfulness, an intellectual apprehension of the gospel from a life that fits with what we profess. The response to the gospel must be a trust in God that lives in that trust, that literally “faiths” or walks in faithfulness.
The gospel is offered and is wonderful. How have you responded to it? Do you believe Jesus? Do you “faith” in Him? If not, I would like to invite you to come to Jesus and experience the good news He offers.
Another response is exemplified by Paul as he responded in obedience to the call from God to proclaim the gospel. Paul’s passion for the gospel was such that he was willing to go wherever God sent him to proclaim that gospel. This is a powerful example and challenge for us to also be people who go and proclaim the gospel. If the gospel is so powerful, so life changing, so exciting, as Romans reveals it is, then surely it is right and even great to commit our lives to the proclamation of the gospel. O that our lives were defined by the powerful gospel of Jesus Christ!
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