Strathalbyn Church of Christ

Sermon Romans 1:13-17. Theme: Made right by faith. Sermon by Pastor David Williams. Strathalbyn Church of Christ. 30 Oct 2022.

Paul is all out for the gospel. He’s like those cricket tragics in Scotland. They never miss an opportunity to talk up their prospects, to convince sceptics – this year is the year they will beat the English. Not a shadow of doubt.

So it is with Paul and the gospel. With 3 words, he drives this home: I am bound; I am eager; I am not ashamed.

· I am bound to Greeks and non-Greeks, that is, to the whole Gentile world. Jesus himself appeared to Paul in a vision and sent him out as apostle to the Gentiles. Paul is bound – he is compelled to preach the Gospel.

· I am eager to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome. Rome was the capital of the Gentile world. Reach Rome with the gospel and it will spread out rapidly from there.

· I am not ashamed of the gospel. He was not embarrassed by the gospel or afraid of preaching it.

What a contrast is Paul to Christians today. If we tell the good news at all, we feel like we’ve done God a favour – rather than being bound to do so. We feel reluctant, not eager and we do feel ashamed of the gospel.

Just over 500 years ago, a monk in a little town in Germany read Paul’s words and became gripped by the same passion that Paul had. The Protestant Reformation was born. Let us look at this passage that created a revolution in the history of both the church and the world.

This short passage has 4 parts.

1. Don’t be ashamed

2. Power that saves

3. Being right with God

4. Faith

Together they sum up the theme of Paul’s whole letter to the Romans. Paul begins,

1. Don’t be ashamed

For I am not ashamed of the gospel,

The pressures on us are great to shut up. At family parties. In the clubrooms or the cafe. Christianity is out of date and intolerant. Its priests are paedophiles. They deny climate change and Biden’s election. How can they say they have the truth when they blatantly deny reality. In the face of these attitudes, it is much easier to say nothing, to be ashamed of the gospel.

Paul knew how hard it was to preach the gospel. He faced riots and was stoned and imprisoned (2 Cor 11:25). He was ridiculed. The gospel was foolishness to Greeks and a stumbling block to Jews (1 Cor 1:23). It offends our human pride – by saying that we cannot save ourselves. It overturns our religion dismissing our vain attempts to please God. It sounds ridiculous to the chattering classes – the idea that a god would come and die on a cross to somehow save us. It is easy to feel ashamed of the gospel. But listen to Jesus warning,

For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory … Lk 9:26.

Why do Jesus and Paul insist we should not be ashamed? Read on …

2. Power that saves

for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes

Why is Paul not ashamed of the gospel? Because it is the power of God to rescue.

You know what it is like at working bees. Guys bring an assortment of tools. Mr Ozito brings out the drill he got from the big green shed. His bits are cheap, the torque gives up after the first hint of resistance and the battery goes flat after 10 minutes. Then someone brings out a decent rotary hammer that cuts through concrete like butter. And Mr Ozito is looking for somewhere to hide.

Friends our gospel is powerful. The gospel is the power of God for salvation. We have a gospel that cuts through death itself. Never be ashamed of the gospel. In Corinthians, Paul calls the gospel “the word of the cross”. He says, “for us who are being saved this word is the power of God”. For it is based on “Christ the power of God” (1 Cor 1:18, 24).

The gospel rescues. The gospel and only the gospel. Not the Law, not Mohammed, not mindfulness, not the Book of Mormon. Only the gospel of the risen Christ has the power to rescue us from death.

Some churches say preaching is out of date. We won’t reach the post-modern generation by preaching to them. But Jesus promised,

this gospel will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come, Mt 24:14.

Jesus didn’t put an end-date on preaching the gospel. The gospel proclaimed is powerful – for the gospel saves as it is spoken, as it is preached. It is not our good example that saves, or some religious experience like speaking in tongues, or following religious rituals; it is the gospel proclaimed. For the gospel is the message of Jesus dying for our sins and rising in victory. As people hear the gospel proclaimed, the Spirit pulls them from death into life. We were dead. Dead men cannot find the way to life. God reached out and brought us to life through the preaching of the gospel.

As Wesley sung,

Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quickening ray,
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

It is the gospel, and only the gospel, that has the power to set hearts free, to give life to the dead.

The gospel is for all!

The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

The gospel came first to the Jews, for the gospel can be found in the OT. But in the NT, the full truth of the gospel has been revealed – it is a message of salvation for everyone who believes. There are some who think the Jews will enter God’s kingdom simply by following the law. No way! People who think that need to read Romans. The Jews need the gospel too.

The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

It is the gospel that saves.

3. Being right with God

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed

The gospel is powerful to save because the gospel reveals God’s righteousness.

Righteousness can mean justice or rightness.

God himself is righteous. As judge of all the earth, he will always do right (Gn 18:25). He loves righteousness and hates wickedness (Ps 45:7). Righteousness is the sceptre of his kingdom (Ps 45:6).

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed

There are right ways of understanding this verse, and a wrong way. The wrong way is how Martin Luther first saw it. Luther was a very pious monk. As with other monks, his prayers began at 2am every morning. Yet he went further than most to try and get right with God. After confessing his sins, he went straight back into confession to confess yet more. Catholics practiced penance – punishing yourself for your sins. Luther even slept in the snow as penance.

Yet his conscience was troubled. He saw God as a harsh judge. He hated the words - the justice – or righteousness - of God; the words, In the gospel the justice of God is revealed. He knew that nothing he did could satisfy the demands of God’s justice. Nothing he did could allow him to stand in God’s presence. And in that he was right.

The problem Luther had, and the problem we all have is that sin cannot dwell with righteousness. God is righteous – sin cannot dwell with him (Ps 5:4,5). And so that excludes every one of us, for in Romans we read

no one is righteous, no, not one. No one understands, no one seeks for God. All have turned aside… no one does good, not even one, Rom 3:10-18.

Yet Luther was also wrong – wrong in the way he was reading these verses. He was reading them through the eyes of a Catholic monk. He was trying to become righteous through his own efforts so as to live a life of faith. But he knew he was not righteous.

It is not just Catholics that try to do things to please God or punish themselves as a sort of penance to fix things up with God. We Protestants are just as good at this game. By nature, in our pride, we trust in our own works. Are you trying to please God through your own efforts. Are you trying to make things up with God? What a fruitless quest. It is not just Catholic monks who put confidence in their efforts, or as Paul says, in the flesh. Paul said,

If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more … as to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. 7 But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ…

I count them as rubbish (as dung), in order that I may gain Christ … not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, Phil 3:4-9.

The great breakthrough that Paul and Luther discovered is that it is not up to us. We cannot and will not ever reach up to God. We cannot ever reach his high and holy standards. We cannot ever make things right. But in the gospel, we discover that God has already set things right. There is nothing left to do. In the gospel, God makes a way for us to be righteous. That is, God rescues us. On the cross, Jesus bore our sin.

In the gospel, God also declares us as righteous. We are justified by his grace. There are lots of big words used to describe what happens at the cross. Words like justification and atonement. Justified means it is just-as-if-I’d never sinned.

Atonement is a word invented to mean we are at-one with God. Through the cross God made an at-one-ment with us. God’s righteousness means that we are right with God. We are at one with him. Just as if I’d never sinned.

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God, 2 Cor 5:21

That is hard to imagine isn’t it? God the Father, Christ the son – so perfect. Yet in Christ, we become that righteousness. Clothed in his righteousness alone, faultless I stand before the throne. Is that how you see yourself – for that is how God sees you. It doesn’t matter what you have done. If you believe in Christ, it doesn’t even matter what you will do. For his death covers all your sin. Faultless you stand before his throne.

God has saved us through the work of Christ on the cross. This salvation is revealed through the gospel. The gospel shows us that we are now one with God, for our sins have been forgiven. That is clear. How then do we receive that forgiveness? What do we need to do to earn it? Answer – nothing. There is nothing we can do to earn forgiveness.

4. Faith:

God’s righteousness comes to us as a gift. We receive it by faith.

For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed

a righteousness that is by faith from first to last

From start to finish, it is faith and faith alone that makes us right with God.

Solas

The Reformers came up with some catchcries that summarised their beliefs. You need to appreciate that they all wrote in Latin. Three of their catchcries were

· Sola gratia - by grace alone

· Sola fide - through faith alone

· Sola Christus - in Christ alone

We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone and in Christ alone.

Sola gratia: That is, we can do nothing to obtain God’s gift of salvation. It is by grace alone. Our choice doesn’t even come into it! A man whose heart has stopped cannot ask for defibrillators. When we were dead in our sins, we could not reach out to God for help. I know this goes against how some of us experienced conversion, but the Bible, and the Reformers, were clear on this – that God’s grace does not depend on our willingness. For instance, Paul writes:

Even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved, Eph 2:5

By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. Eph 2:8-10.

Sola fide: No work that we do can earn us merit before God, it is by faith alone. Paul warns that

no one will be justified by their works but only through faith in Christ, Gal 2:16.

Sola Christus: No one can save us – no saints, or Mary, or the church – none but Christ alone can save us.

By grace alone, through faith alone and in Christ alone. This is what the Reformers taught based on Paul’s writings.

Habakkuk

Verse 17 ends with a quote from Habakkuk.

“The righteous shall live by faith.”

In Habakkuk**,** God promised that the godless Babylonians would fall, but the Israelites who trusted in God would live.

Don’t read this the wrong way, as Luther first did. It does not say that the good ones – the righteous - will live because of their goodness. For then no one could ever come up to the mark. There is no one who does good, said Paul.

How often do we hear people say, I have no regrets. I have lived a good life. Yes, there are some great people out there – people of many faiths and of none – people who are kind and generous, hardworking, loyal and devoted to family and friends. Yet all of us fall short.

Do you find this too harsh? Then look at the great commandments:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength… Love your neighbor as yourself, Mk 12:30-31_._

There is no one – be they Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Ghandi who has even come close to adhering to either commandment. No, we all have gone our own way. We have all replaced God with our self-made gods. And so often we put ourselves first.

“The righteous shall live by faith”,

or some translations state:

“It is through faith that a righteous person has life.”

It is through faith that a person is made right with God.

Paul is not saying - Be good so you can live a life of faith,

but - Through faith you are made good, and so live.

Paul again quoted this verse in Galatians. He argued that no one will be justified by their work – that is, by obeying the Jewish law. Rather we are justified only through faith in Christ (Gal 2:15-3:14).

Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law… For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law, Gal 2:16 NLT.

Friends, we cannot get right with God by obeying the law, by doing good works. Faith and faith alone is what unites us with Christ.

To sum up, let us read these revolutionary words together. Let us read them as a statement of our faith, and as a prayer too. These words that transformed Luther’s life and many others also.

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 the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed,

a righteousness that is by faith from first to last;

as it is written,

“The righteous shall live by faith.” (Rom 1:16-17, ESV & NIV)

To that we say, Amen!

Sources:

· Osborne G. R. (2003). Romans. IVP.

· Stott J. R. W. (1994). The message of Romans. IVP.

·

Series: Romans

Topics: #Romans , #Righteousness , #Reformation