The Power of the Gospel
By
John C. Orlando, Jr.
13 February 2005
Knox Presbyterian Church,
Oklahoma City, OK
Text: Romans 1:16-17
Background
of Text: The year was 57 AD, during Nero’s reign of the Roman Empire, and Paul
writes this Epistle to a church that he had never visited.
The Epistle of Romans has been referred to as the Constitution of the
Christian faith, as Paul systematically expounds on every key doctrine of the
Christian faith, and our text this morning set the theme for the entire letter.
Intro
Scripture declares, “there is a way that seems right to a man, but the ends thereof are the ways of death.” The truth of those sobering words can be easily seen in all of the vain, empty, and powerless self-help philosophies and religions that promise a life of contentment and eternal bliss, but fail to ultimately deliver what they so adamantly promise.
Where all of the self-help programs and false religions are powerless to deliver on their promise of contentment, both in this life and the life to come, the Gospel of Jesus Christ stands as the only power in heaven and in earth that can deliver on all of its promises!
All of the designs of men, all of the philosophies of men, and all of the false religions of men will fail because they all lack the power necessary to change the human the heart from a heart of stone to a heart of flesh. It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ alone that is the only indestructible power that can give faith to the faithless, hope to the hopeless, love to the loveless, and life to the lifeless!
In our passage, Paul sets the theme for the entire letter to the Romans: The Gospel is God’s power for salvation, and the power by which we must live each day, because it shows us that in and of ourselves, we are utterly unrighteous, but there is now righteousness that comes from God that is imputed or credited to all who believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul touches first of all on…
I.
The Glory of the Gospel
A. Verse 16 “For…”– As we come to our text, we note Paul is continuing his thought from the preceding verses where he has made mention of the Gospel he was about to proclaim.
In verses 1-4 he immediately launches into words of praise for the Gospel by
pointing to it as the fulfillment of the promise made through the prophets in the Scriptures concerning Christ, whose message and ministry was declared and validated with power by His resurrection. When Paul says that this Gospel was something that was promised before through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures, our minds are immediately fixed to eternal matters.
The Word of God, and thus the Gospel, is something that has been settled in Heaven from all eternity, and the fact that the prophets proclaimed that message which has its genesis in the eternal mind and purposes of God demonstrates the sovereignty and providence of God, who not only foreordained that there would be a Gospel, but also determined what that Gospel was to be, and who would be its ultimate beneficiaries.
So utterly glorious is this Gospel that Paul is about to expound upon that he says in verse 15 that he is eager to preach the Gospel to those who are in Rome, and now in verse 16 he says:
B. Verse 16 cont’d - “I am not ashamed of the gospel…” – Why would Paul feel the need to say that he was not ashamed of the gospel? Well, Paul would be proclaiming the Christ who died the shameful death of crucifixion. No one, whether Jew or Gentile, regarded crucifixion as something glorious. Crucifixion was used by the Romans as cruel and hideous form of torture reserved for the lowest of the low; a shameful display to further add insult to injury. To the Jews, it was both a shameful death, and a sign that one had been cursed by God, as Paul would remind the churches in Galatia, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on the tree.” One who had suffered such a thing would be regarded as anything except what Paul would proclaim!
Here then Paul reassures and encourages his Roman readers that he is willing to go to the very heart and soul of the Roman Empire, Rome itself, and confront all of its depravity, all of its philosophies, all of its “wisdom,” with the Gospel of Christ…He is willing to go to the throne room if you will of the Emperor who took to himself the title of God incarnate, to proclaim loudly and boldly the One and True Living and eternal God incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ, who humbled Himself and took the form of a servant, and endured the shameful spectacle of the cross; to the Jew a stumbling block, and to the Gentiles foolishness, to prove that death had no power over Him, for He was raised from the grave, and salvation is found in other name.
Paul stands eager and unashamed to proclaim this glorious Gospel because he says:
C. “…it is the power of God to salvation”- 2 things to notice here:
1. “power of God” – The Greek word for power in this passage is the word
dunamis, where we get the English word dynamite. The word means inherent power residing in a thing by virtue of its nature that is exerted and put forth. Here then we have the omnipotent God of the universe, who alone exerts the power necessary to explode through hard hearts of stone through His ordained means: the glorious Gospel of Christ. Paul knew the power of this Gospel first hand. What else could possibly have turned the anti-Christian zealot Saul of Tarsus, who was having Christian’s murdered, into the Apostle Paul, the man who now is not ashamed of the very Gospel he once despised and tried to eradicate from the face of the earth!
This isn’t just some self-help philosophy designed to appeal to our fleshly desires and “felt-needs.” This isn’t a seeker-sensitive church growth scheme aimed at tickling the itching ears of Secular Sam, or Secular Suzy. It is the message of the cross, the very truth of God Himself, which Paul says in 1 Cor 1:18 is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved is the power of God! As Paul said in that passage, he says here: it is the power…
2. “to salvation” - From God’s perspective the whole of our salvation is finished. We have been justified. We have been, are still being, and will be sanctified, and though it still hasn’t occurred, we have been glorified. How is this all possible? Because of the Gospel! We must view the Gospel in terms of its objective and intrinsic efficacy! What in the world does that mean?! It means that the Gospel is something that never fails to accomplish every aspect of our salvation, and it doesn’t need our help to make it work.
It means that the cross was not a Divine afterthought, as if it were a plan B, in the mind of God, where God sent His Son to die, crossed His fingers, and hoped that someone might “accept” Him. It was the place where Christ made a full, all-sufficient, all-powerful, all-efficient, and perfect sacrifice, and finished the work of atonement whereby He fully satisfied the wrath of God and expiated the sins of His people. By His work on the cross, Jesus accomplished far more than just making people savable. He actually saved them! Jesus doesn’t just try to save; Jesus saves!
B. The Universal Nature of the Gospel: The Gospel is the power of salvation:
1. Verse 16c - “…to everyone who believes…Jew…Greek,” - The Gospel
holds no ethnic or geographical boundaries: It is the means by which an absolutely sovereign and Holy God has determined to infallibly save a multitude of sinners from every nation, tribe and tongue; sinners who deserved nothing except the just condemnation and wrath of God. Yet God, out of His sheer mercy and grace and alone, chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, then came to us in the Person of Christ, lived the perfect life we could never live, laid down His life on the cross and bore the full penalty for sins, rose from the dead, and then guarantees the free gift of eternal life to every single person who believes.
But we must note that one of the benefits of the Gospel is that it gives to us the very faith that is needed to embrace it, because that faith was itself something that Jesus purchased on the cross. In other words, Jesus didn’t just do His part, and now we do ours. The Gospel isn’t merely a theoretical message that we can either take or leave. It is about what God has purposed, what God has accomplished, what God has applied, and what God has done, is doing, and will do! There is nothing left to be done to secure the salvation of people. The work of Jesus Christ on the cross is effectual in and of its self. It doesn’t need anything to be added to it to make it effective: it doesn’t need the sacraments, or the “free will” decision of a person to fill up what is lacking in its saving power. Jesus actually saved people at the cross!
True enough, the benefits of that work must be appropriated through saving faith and repentance. However, faith is not the cause of our salvation; rather, it is the instrument, given to us by Christ, through which we are enabled to take hold of Him who had taken hold of us from before the foundation of the world. Thus, Jesus Christ Himself is the sole sufficient and efficient cause of our salvation.
Paul now is about to strike the key chord in the symphony of the Gospel. Paul says that the Gospel is the power of salvation …for in it…
2. Verse 17 “the righteousness of God is revealed” - The Holy God of the universe who is absolutely righteous Himself requires perfect righteous of those who would enter into His presence. How can we, who are totally depraved creatures, whose righteousness the prophet Isaiah describes as “filthy rags” and whose best works, as the Confession says, are “defiled and mixed with our weakness and imperfection, and cannot stand the scrutiny of God’s judgment,” ever have any hope of living and reigning with God for eternity?
God, by His grace, orchestrated a great exchange of clothes, so to speak. When Jesus died on the cross, God took the sinner’s dirty clothes, and placed them on Jesus, and when the sinner places saving faith in Christ, God takes the perfectly clean clothes of Jesus, and places them on the sinner. The clothes are Jesus’ clothes that have been given to the sinner as a gift.
I remember when I first joined the military. I walked into basic training in my own civilian clothes. The military then issued me the clothes they wanted me to wear to identify me as one of theirs. Once I put on that uniform, I was then fully identified as a member of the Air Force, and not a civilian, and as such I had full access to all of the privileges that are afforded those who are in the Air Force—privileges that can only be enjoyed by those who “wear the uniform.”
The only righteousness that could ever qualify one for Heaven is a perfect righteousness, and the only One who has a perfect righteousness is God Himself. When we embrace Christ by saving faith, we receive the imputed righteousness of Christ! We are declared “not guilty!” and we are declared righteous!
This was one of the great truths recovered during the Reformation. Martin Luther, an Augustinian Monk, experienced extreme torment of soul as he languished under the heavy yoke of the righteousness and holiness of God that was revealed in God’s Law. Luther understood that this Holy God required nothing less than perfect righteousness from those who would dare enter His presence, and Luther was acutely aware of his own shortcomings. The more Luther subjected himself to the scrutiny of the holiness of God, and the more he tried to attain this righteousness through his own works, the more he realized how utterly futile his works were, and the more he viewed God as the hound of heaven who was ready to pounce on him.
Christ became to Luther a consuming judge who stood ready to destroy Luther. So traumatized was Luther by these things that when asked if he loved God, Luther retorted, “Love God! You ask me if I love God! Love God…sometimes I hate God!” But then one day as Luther was preparing his lectures on the book of Romans, he came across these verses we are looking at this morning, and the glorious light of the Gospel broke through on Luther dark and heavy soul, and revolutionized his thinking and turned his life upside down.
Luther would write in 1515: “I greatly longed to understand Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, “the righteousness of God”. . . . Night and day I pondered until . . . I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise....”
The Gospel is not only the power for eternal salvation, but it also gives us the…
II. Power to Live Each Day
A. Verse 17b “…from faith to faith;” – The idea here is one of growth unto maturity. In other words, we enter into righteousness by grace alone through faith alone, in, by, and because of Christ alone—that’s just the beginning! Once we have entered upon the journey of faith, and the only thing that can equip and empower us along our pilgrim’s progress is the very same things that put us on the path in the first place: God’s grace alone, through faith alone, in, by and because of Christ alone. Paul then quotes the prophet Habakkuk:
B. “as it is written, “The righteous man shall live by faith.” Notice it is the righteous
who must live by faith. Who are the righteous? As noted above, only those who, by God’s sovereign grace alone, have been given the gift of saving faith and repentance and embraced Christ as both Lord and Savior, because they have had the righteousness of another, the Lord Jesus Christ, credited to them. We entered into eternal life by grace alone through faith alone, and now we must live our everyday lives by faith.
Sadly many of us lose sight of this. Oh, yes, we have embraced the Gospel and received Christ as our Lord and Savior. But I fear that far too often we then take the Gospel and put it on the shelf after we receive Christ. We think that the Gospel is only for unbelievers! Once we do that though, we have moved away from the only thing that can give us victory in our daily lives in our battles with the world, the flesh, and the devil. We begin to try and earn God’s favor by doing or not doing all kinds of things, and when we mess up, we feel overwhelming guilt.
Do you see the problem here? We fall right back into the trap of trying to earn God’s favor by what we do. While we believe in justification by faith alone, we nevertheless fall into the trap of believing in sanctification by works alone. The only thing this produces in bondage.
I’ll never forget hearing about the preacher who constantly told the congregation: “We need to quit riding the coattails of God’s grace!” Dear one, if we’re not riding the coattails of God’s grace, the only thing we are going to do is crash! No beloved! Let us mount up upon those mighty coattails of God’s awesome grace and ride them all the way to glory!
It is God alone who gives power to the weak, and those that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk, and not faint! Why? Because they are resting in the grace of God and righteousness of Jesus Christ alone! We must take hold of that glorious Gospel of the Living Christ, and we must set our eyes upon it everyday, and we must preach it to ourselves everyday!
The Gospel of Christ is not a pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality, but a dying to yourself mentality that is attained by the same kind of faith that justifies: trusting in Jesus Christ alone. Christ is the only solid rock upon which we can ever stand.
Conclusion
Let us be encouraged this day not to do what seems right to us, according to the flesh, knowing that it only ends in death, but let us live in accordance to the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ! Not only is it the means that God is using to perfectly save sinners from every nation, tribe and tongue, but it is the power we need to live each day.
Let us rejoice in our sovereign God who not only foreordained that there would be a Gospel, but also determined what that Gospel was to be, and who would be its ultimate beneficiaries.
Let us stand amazed at the Gospel of our great God and Savior, who humbled Himself and became obedient to death, even the death of the cross, and perfectly accomplished all that the Father sent Him to accomplish.
Let
us, with Martin Luther, come to realized our desperate condition before an
absolutely holy God, but then with Luther, let us walk through the open doors of
paradise as we flee to Christ and grasp the truth that the righteousness of God
is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us
by faith.
Let us, beloved, fix our eyes fully on Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
Let us rest in the only power that can sustain us: The Gospel of Jesus Christ. As the hymn says, “Our hope is built on nothing less Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. We dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly trust in Jesus’ Name!” Amen.