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The Gospel is the theme of the entire Book of Romans. Paul was not ashamed of it because it releases the power of God and reveals the righteousness of God. Listen in and hear about the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ!
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Not Ashamed Of The Gospel
Romans 1:16-17
When a piano player is hired to play at a party, he often will start off by banging out some loud chords to get everyone’s attention. Everyone is talking and laughing and milling around, so in order to let them know the entertainment is about to begin, he must get their attention. Once he has got their attention, he begins to play the theme of his music. Well, in Romans 1:1-15, Paul has been banging on his piano a little bit. He’s been getting their attention, by introducing himself, and his Lord, and his gospel. He’s been telling them that he has for a long time desired to visit them. Well, now, having gotten their attention, he is going to launch into his theme.
You see, Romans 1:16-17 is the theme of the entire book of Romans. It is like the acorn, and the huge tree of Romans will grow out of this little acorn. The whole book is merely the unpacking of these verses. If we are ever to understand the book of Romans, we must understand Romans 1:16-17.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones states in his commentary on Romans: “In a sense, there are no two verses of greater importance in the whole of Scripture than verses 16 & 17. In a sense these two verses are responsible for the Protestant Reformation.”
I want you to notice what the great subject of these verses is. “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.”
The word “gospel” comes from the Old English word “God-spell.” The gospel is the spell, or story of what God has done in Christ to save sinners. It literally means “glad tidings” or “good news.”
Now, in our text, Paul has been telling the Romans that he is under obligation to everyone to preach the gospel to them. Not only does Paul feel this obligation to preach, but he is eager to preach the gospel to those who are in Rome. Then, he tells us that he is not ashamed of the gospel. When Paul says that he is not ashamed of the gospel, he is putting it in the negative to emphasize something. What Paul means is that he boasts in the gospel, he glories in the gospel. That’s what he said in Galatians 6:14, “But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” So Paul is obligated to preach the gospel, eager to preach the gospel, and not ashamed to preach the gospel. But why? Why isn’t Paul ashamed to preach the gospel. The gospel had brought untold suffering into Paul’s life! It was because of the gospel that Paul was stoned in Lystra, chased out of Thessalonica, imprisoned and beaten in Phillipi, mocked in Athens, and had continual threats on his life. So, why does Paul glory in it?
Paul tells us in our text that it is because of two things. 1. The gospel releases the power of God. 2. The gospel reveals the righteousness of God.
1. The Gospel Releases The Power of God
Salvation. What does the gospel do? Our text does not say that it heals, or drives out demons, or makes rich, or causes to speak with tongues. Not, it says that it is the power of God for salvation. Now, exactly what do we mean by “salvation”? A person who has experienced salvation has been rescued, or delivered, or brought into a state of safety. If a little child is trapped inside a burning house with no way to escape, and the firefighters break his bedroom door down, place a wet cloth over his face, and carry him out of the house, that child has experienced salvation. When a little child has drowned, and the EMTs administer CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and the little child revives, he has experienced salvation. In both situations, the child was delivered out of a condition of perilous danger and brought into a state of safety. Well, that’s exactly what the term means in our Bibles. All people were ruined in the Fall. We are born into this world with a sinful nature, children of wrath. Because all men are sinful, God’s holiness and justice require that He punish them. All people will face the wrath of God head on, unless they find a remedy for this desperate situation. Well, God in His mercy has provided the remedy Himself. Man could never remedy his situation, because his condition is too far gone. He is a slave to his sin and unable to change his own nature and heart. So, God in His grace has provided the Gospel – The Good News. Jesus Christ is the Gospel. Jesus is God’s answer to our desperate problem. All of us are in burning houses, with a wall of flames all around us and no way to escape. Or to change the analogy, we are all miners deep underground when an earthquake hits, and the only exit has been sealed shut with tons and tons of dirt and rocks. There is no way those trapped miners can escape. If they are ever to experience “salvation” it must come from outside. That is exactly what God did when He sent His Son, Jesus Christ! God’s deliverance came from the outside, because man could not save himself.
The Bible speaks of salvation in 3 ways: In the Past, the Present, and the Future.
1) Salvation In The Past: We have been saved. Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith.” This aspect of salvation is deliverance from the Penalty of Sin. It refers to Justification.
2) Salvation In The Present: We are being saved. 1Cor.1:18, “to us who are being saved the word of the cross is the power of God.” This aspect of salvation is deliverance from the Power of Sin. It refers to Sanctification.
3) Salvation In The Future: We will be saved. 1Pet.1:5, “we are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” This aspect of salvation is deliverance from the Presence of Sin. It refers to Glorification.
So, the gospel is the power of God to save us from sin’s penalty, power, and presence.
Power of God. The gospel is the exact opposite of self-salvation. It is completely opposed to salvation based on human power and human effort. The gospel is not “trying harder”, or “turning over a new leaf”, or “doing our best to fix our sinful problems.” It is not God telling us what we must do to be saved. It is God telling us what He has done.
So what does Paul mean when he says that the gospel is the power of God for salvation? He means that salvation is God’s mighty working in us through the gospel. Through the preaching and believing of the gospel, God’s mighty power is released in the believer’s life, enabling him to persevere and triumph over every obstacle and ultimately find himself in the presence of God forever.
Every aspect of our salvation from eternity past to eternity future comes to us through God’s power. In Romans 8:29-30 we are told that we have been foreknown, predestined, called, justified, and glorified. All of that, the whole thing, is the result of God’s great power. Since salvation is the result of God’s power, it will succeed. It is certain. It will be effective. Now, if our salvation were the result of our effort, or striving, or trying, it would end up a hopeless failure. However, it’s not! How much power does God possess? All power! Thus, God’s call is an irresistible call. Go ahead, and see if you can resist the omnipotence of God! God’s justification is effective – it can never be overruled. Those whom God justifies can never be condemned (8:33). Christ’s atoning sacrifice effectively removes all guilt from those who believe (8:34). God’s love is effective – it will keep us until the end (8:35-39). Our salvation is not an iffy kind of thing, contingent upon the fickle and weak wills of God’s creatures. It is dependent on God’s power – that’s why it is sure and certain! David knew this. He prayed, “Truly is not my house so with God? For He has made an everlasting covenant with me, ordered in all things, and secured; for all my salvation and all my desire, will He not indeed make it grow?” (2Sam.23:5).
So, Paul boasts and glories in this gospel, not only because it brings about a rescue for fallen sinners, but because it does so by God’s own power. This is the kind of gospel we can exult in! If it is dependent on God’s power, it will not fail us. Since this gospel is about what God does, not us, we don’t have to stress out. God who began the work in us will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.
For everyone who believes. Our text says, “to everyone who believes, the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Who is this gospel available to? Everyone! Who does it benefit? Everyone who believes! Who are God’s people? Believers.
Notice that it is “for the Jew first and also to the Greek.” In other words this gospel is for the entire world. It is for all people everywhere. There is no race of men under heaven that have been excluded. It is for Canadians as well as for Britains. It is for Mexicans as well as Indians. It is for Africans as well as Chinese. It is for old men and little children. It is for men and women. God has thrown open His arms wide in the gospel, because all people need it. All have been infected by sin. All are ruined by it. All will perish by it. And in God’s great heart of love, He has provided a Savior sufficient for its enormous need.
The word everyone is balanced by who believe. The gospel will not ultimately save all men. It will only save those who believe. That’s why in vs. 17 we are told that the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. Faith is the key. Often people say, “well we’re all God’s children, right?” Well, yes in the sense that we are all created by Him in His image. But no in the sense that we are all adopted into His family. This is the same thing that Paul stresses throughout this letter. In Romans 3:22 he says, “even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe, for there is no distinction.” In Romans 10:4 he writes, “For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.”
Now, the fact that faith is the only requirement to benefit from the gospel is wonderful! That means that God is not looking at our performance, our rock solid obedience, our hard work, but rather He asks us to simply take Him at His word. There is nothing to do – just to believe in what has already been done. What could be more wonderful than this Good News which comes to us merely by faith!
Sometimes Christians say that repentance has absolutely nothing to do with being converted. They point to verses like Romans 1:16-17, which mention believing and faith, but do not mention repentance. However, let’s think of this a little more deeply. Faith is really a turning to Christ to find all in Him. However, I can’t turn to Christ, unless I turn away from everything else. Turning away from sin is repentance, and turning to Christ is faith. Don’t you see, that they are two sides of the same thing? You can’t believe without repenting, and you can’t repent without believing.
So, we have seen that the Gospel delivers us from the Ruin of the Fall, rescuing us from God’s righteous wrath in an ultimate and final sense. We’ve seen that it does so by virtue of God’s own power, and therefore it cannot fail. We’ve also seen that it is freely offered and is made available for all people everywhere, and that it is received by faith alone, and not by any works or deeds of the Law. Are you starting to see why Paul was not ashamed of the gospel, but instead gloried in it, and boasted of it?! There is still one more aspect of the gospel that we need to examine.
2. The Gospel Reveals The Righteousness Of God
What This Text Does Not Say. Now, notice what this text does not say. It doesn’t say, “in it the love of God is revealed from faith to faith.” That is the emphasis in popular evangelical Christianity today in the United States. When people think of the gospel they think of God’s love. Now, it is true that the gospel does reveal the love of God, but that is not what Paul is talking about here. You see, no matter how great God’s love is it couldn’t just sweep our unrighteousness under the rug and let bygones be bygones. God’s love is not just some warm, fuzzy, sentimental thing in which God says, “I feel nice to you, so I’m going to be nice to you.” If that were true, there would be no need for the bloody, gruesome death of the Son of God! God’s wrath must be appeased. Our unrighteousness must be atoned for, forgiven, and then covered with God’s own righteousness. And that is the message of the gospel. The gospel takes our unrighteousness and God’s righteousness into account, and deals with that whole situation through the cross of Jesus Christ.
The Righteousness Of God. Now, what did Paul mean by “in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed.” What did Paul mean by the righteousness of God? Was Paul thinking about God’s perfect, holy, inflexible righteousness, on account of which He must judge unrighteous sinners? Our problem is that God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against our unrighteousness (1:18). So how can a revelation of God’s righteousness be Good News to us?
Martin Luther said that he hated Romans 1:17 until he finally understood what it was saying. Luther wrote, “I had been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. But… a single word in Chapter 1 [verse 17] stood in my way, ‘in it the righteousness of God is revealed.’ For I hated that word ‘righteousness of God,’ which… I had been taught to understand is the righteousness [with which God] punishes the unrighteous sinner.”
So, does the righteousness of God refer to God’s inherent righteousness which He possesses in Himself and demands from us? No, I don’t think so, for a couple of reasons. First, because if that were true, then there is no Good News to it! That would be Bad News of the greatest kind! I can’t think of any worse news to tell people than “God is righteous, and you are unrighteous, so God will judge you!” Now, although that is true, that is not the Gospel. It’s not Good News. But this verse says that the righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel – the Good News. Also, notice that although the righteousness is God’s in the first half of the verse, it is man’s in the second half of the verse. So, the righteousness of God that is revealed in vs. 17, is not mainly the fact that God Himself is righteous, but that He imputes or credits His own righteousness to us.
So, what Paul is saying is that although God is righteous, and demands righteousness of us, we don’t have it to give, so God gives it to us. That’s why the revelation of God’s righteousness is Good News! In the Gospel, God gives to us the righteousness that He demands from us. I mentioned earlier, that God imputes or credits this righteousness to us. What that means, is that God puts His own righteousness to your account. In other words God treats you as if you were Jesus, because He treated Jesus as if He were you! God put our sins to Jesus’ account as He died on the cross, so that now He can put Jesus’ righteousness to our account. Philippians 3:9 is one of the clearest statements on this truth of any in the Scriptures. There Paul writes, “and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.” Notice from this text that when a person is in Him, they don’t have a self-righteousness based on their obedience to the Law, they have a righteousness which comes from God as His gift, received entirely by faith.
When Martin Luther finally grasped this truth he wrote, “My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would appease Him… night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement in Romans 1:17 that “the righteous man shall live by faith.” Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.”
Again, Luther can be helpful here. He wrote, “For God does not want to save us by our own but by an extraneous righteousness, one that does not originate in ourselves but comes to us from beyond ourselves, which does not arise on earth but comes from heaven.”
God requires 100% righteousness. A criminal might have 1% of this righteousness. A moral leader might have 10% of it. But both need to learn to curse their %, abandon all hope of salvation by means of it, and come to the cross of Jesus Christ to receive 100% of a totally different righteousness.
This is the glory of the Gospel. We are unrighteous. God is righteous. That’s why His wrath is revealed against us (vs. 18). That’s why He must judge us. But at the same time, God promises to credit His perfect righteousness to our account when we believe. How can God do that? He does that because of the finished work of Jesus Christ. Jesus lived a perfect righteous life and then died as our Substitute on Calvary’s cross. God regarded Christ as if He were us, so that He could regard us as if we were Him! That’s what we mean when we talk of The Great Exchange. Jesus exchanged places with us. He was perfect. We are sinful. He took our place (we deserved to die upon that cross), so that we could take His place (He deserved eternal glory). So He gets the Cross, and we get the Glory! Hallelujah!
From Faith To Faith. What does Paul mean by this phrase? He means that we enter into a state of salvation by faith, we continue in it by faith, and we will arrive in glory by faith. The principle never changes. Paul doesn’t say, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to works.” No, faith is that divine principle that the believer lives by from first to last. Folks, the holiest man or woman who has ever lived, could never approach God on the basis of their works. The only way we can be accepted by God from first to last is through faith in Jesus Christ.
Life Application
The Gospel is the answer to the world’s real problems! What is the real problem the world is facing? It’s not poverty, hunger, crime, disease, poor education, or war. These are all effects. Let’s go to the cause. The cause of all these great problems facing our world is sin! None of those things existed before the Fall. All of them came into the world as a result of the Fall. Man has been ruined by the Fall. All of these other problems stem from the one great problem – sin. And the gospel is the only thing that can really solve the sin problem! The gospel can atone for sin, forgive sin, remove sin, cancel sin’s debt, and then it can transform the sinner into a holy man or woman of God. Then it takes him through every obstacle all the way into the very presence of our holy and glorious God to dwell in His presence forever.
So, if you are not in Christ today, you’re one great, all consuming need is to believe the gospel. The Good News is that God has sent His Son, to die and atone for your sin, and credit His perfect righteousness to your account. Believe in the gospel of Christ this morning! Trust Him! Surrender to Him! Begin to walk in communion with Him! That is the first thing you must do to find real Life! Nothing else ultimately matters if you don’t believe this gospel. If you die without believing this gospel, you are of all men most to be pitied!
If you are in Christ this morning, I have the same message for you – believe in the gospel of Christ! We make progress in the Christian life the exact same way we began the Christian life – by faith. “As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him” (Col. 2:6). We not only begin the Christian life by believing the gospel, every advance we make in this Christian life is by believing the gospel! The gospel is not just the A, B, C of the Christian life. It is the A to Z of the Christian life! It is not just the door to the house. It is the door, the foundation, the walls, the roof, and everything else!
Let me show you this. When Paul wanted to help Christian husbands and wives be more holy in marriage, did he go to some super advanced Christian teaching? No, he went back to the gospel, and showed how marriage relates to the gospel – “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless” (Eph. 5:25-27). When Paul wanted to teach Christians to give generously, he simply went back to the gospel – “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, so that you through His poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). So, whatever your problem, or need, or sin, go back to the gospel to find the solution. I’m confident you will find your answer there. We don’t need some super deep, super advanced spiritual teaching. What we really need is a deeper understand and application of the gospel of Christ!
What sins are you facing? Believe the gospel. Your sin has been removed from you as far as the east is from the west. You are the righteousness of God in Christ. There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. And because you are in Christ, you have a new power – the power of the Holy Spirit. God has not left you all alone to try to overcome these sins. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead dwells in your mortal bodies. By the power of the Spirit you can put to death the deeds of the body. God’s righteousness is revealed in the gospel from faith to faith. What that means is that you can bank on this gospel of God-given righteousness from the moment you begin to believe, until you take your last breath of faith and awake in the presence of God! Christian – apply the gospel to your life today!
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