Unashamed

Our second it's all sermon from Romans comes from chapter one and I'll be reading the text It's on the screen. We'll be on the screen in just a second. Please read with me It's also in your bulletin first chapter one verses 17 and 18 For I'm not ashamed of the gospel Where 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 for faith as it is written the Righteous shall live by faith I'm not ashamed of the gospel Where it is the power of God under salvation for all who believe for the Jew and the Gentile What that great It's such a fascinating verse this one two verses together really gives us an overture to the entire book and I'm thankful that the movie ladies are always come out so that you can be reminded of what an overture is right It's it's kind of one song that has elements in it that all the other songs are gonna are gonna pick up on and Really no matter where you are in the book of Romans the most obscure passage to the to the most obvious You can find an element of it in this text you can really preach this text for about six or seven hours if you want to but I won't But you could and And it's beautiful, but but what really captures me by it is how it starts I'm not ashamed And I don't know I'd think the same I was eating lunch with Bianca on Friday and we were kicking around the idea of going out with some of her friends and I said we know what would really be fun would be to go to a karaoke bar and Then I quickly went but I won't embarrass you. I promise. I'm sorry and And she said to me. I'm not embarrassed by you're singing I know what she says there, right? She does not say I'm proud of your singing When you say I'm not embarrassed by it kind of implies that I might be You could think that I would be but I'm not and And that's what Paul does here. He doesn't come out and he say I'm proud of it. He says I'm not ashamed of it Which implies that It would be reasonable for you to assume I would be I'm glad the apostle Paul felt that way because I feel that way But you Sometimes aren't you tempted to be ashamed of it? You know what what was Paul like? He was he was a small man and He was talking to Romans and in that time period, you know the word that meant power strength the very personification of dignity and of sophistication and of Just unstoppable power was Rome World conquerors and here he was with his little message about a man that Rome had crucified on Any other day And he says I'm not ashamed To say that yes, that message is your hope That message is what will give you life. I'm not ashamed of that message Because it's the power of salvation and I feel that I mean I Think we're not being honest with ourselves if we don't at least give it a nod You know, just look at the major debates of the day. I mean when You know gun gun controls back in the news and would you feel just absolutely confident going and saying The gospel is the only hope to stop the violence in this country I don't I don't hear that message, you know for either side of the aisle. I don't hear that one and You're not going to You'd be a little bit embarrassed Paul saying I'm not ashamed and I'll tell you why I'm not ashamed I'm not ashamed because the gospel is the power of God Under salvation I'm not ashamed because in the gospel God's righteousness is revealed And I'm not ashamed because the gospel is the only source of life faith in the gospel brings life in a way that nothing else does And that's what we're gonna look at today We're not ashamed of the gospel because it is power because of the unveiling of God's righteousness And because it's the source of life First the first reason Paul is not ashamed is because it has power This is I'm not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation To everyone who believes to the Jew first and to the Greek

You know what it means to not be ashamed of something because it has power When I was a kid, I drove my mom's car. We only had one car in our family And it was a 1975 Caprice classic and I'm not that old Okay, it was 1987 when I was driving it. It was an old car And it was It was nasty You know had cloth seats and the seats were all worn out and you know the little Phone was sticking out and we had to have a bed sheet over the front seat to keep the phone from getting all over you and the The top was kind of sagging down on you like you remember those cars Was from the 70s perfect beautiful pieces of work and and it was rushed around the outside of the of the trunk and so every time it rained water would run down into the trunk and when I would stop it would sound like a washing machine kind of a I know it was it was ugly And down the street for me who lived Kevin Kelly And for Kevin Kelly's 16th birthday He got a fully restored and remodeled 1964 Mustang And it was fly and I was you know jealous But I was not ashamed of my 75 Caprice classic and you want to know why? Because Kevin Kelly's Mustang had a 200 cubic inch engine And my nasty 1975 Caprice had a 360 cubic engine with a four barrel carburetor and I could suck his paint off and spit him out the exhaust pipe

I was on a chain I went out looking for him and this was Paul saying you don't have to be ashamed of the gospel because it's powerful It is powerful It changes lives it changes people it makes them different It is powerful to save them and the question that has to come back if you if you understand your your religion at all is this save you from what It saves you from the power of sin So that you're no longer enslaved to it I was talking to somebody this week who's recounting the days when His life had become one lie after another after another he had he was living a false life And he had to lie to cover it up and he was trying to lie to cover that up and and and he was just he said every day He woke up feeling like he was already in hell And he couldn't escape the lives And the gospel freed him from that It's the power it frees you from the power of sin the slavery to sin It say it saves you from the pollution of sin all the shame That Knowing that the Lord of the universe loves you that that song we just saying love divine all loves excelling the Lord loves you like that the Lord of the universe loves you like that It restores your dignity to you when everybody else would be embarrassed by you When you're embarrassed by yourself

I'll tell you who I would not be ashamed to share the gospel with today You know four years ago Lance Armstrong said if there is anybody if there's the divine judge There I would hope he wouldn't judge me based on whether or not I was baptized I would hope that he would judge me based on whether or not I lived a true life I think he's saying that today Of course not He doesn't want to be judged on whether or not he's been honest and you don't either and Thank God for the power of the gospel that frees us from the shame and it frees us from the penalty It frees us from the guilt It frees us from the bitterness of of looking at everybody who hasn't treated us right It frees us from loneliness by restoring us to community and once we're able to say Yes, I am a sinner. I am broken. I am not what I ought to be I'm not what I should have been then that enables us to come into community and be received and loved

I'm not ashamed of the gospel is the power of goddess under salvation from the power of sin and from the The pollution of sin and yes from the penalty of sin Because Jesus has paid our debt for us So we do not look forward to facing a angry God who's going to cast us into hell And you're going to the exact punishment for months for every sin that we've committed he is satisfied He satisfied And I'm not ashamed of the gospel because it's the power of God to save me from all that Not only is Paul saying he's not ashamed of it because it's powerful But it's both powerful and it has long arms Look at this is a power of God for salvation to everyone who believes To the Jew first but also to the Greek he said has long reach When I was a kid they used to show boxing on television And now you have to do a paper view and I don't think he may even pay for me more but And I remember it was a huge match Uh, Randall Tex Cobb against Larry Holmes Larry Holmes was the undefeated champion of the world and Tex Cobb was very very tough And he was going to be the guy who went 15 rounds with with Larry Holmes and he just thought if I could just get close enough to him He was so strong because you know Tex Cobb from Raising Arizona by the way he was that guy on the motorcycle um He also used to hang out around Vanderbilt and eat it perkins at two in the morning, but that's another story um And he just thought you know if you could ever hit Holmes Holmes would finally go down He was so strong But the problem was this Larry Holmes had a lot further reach And he just used Cobb like a punching bag and and Cobb never even got close to him And you know a few weeks later, you know, Larry, uh, Tex Cobb went on Johnny Carson and Carson So it looked like Larry Holmes had a little bit of a reach advantage. He said yeah, I think I noticed that too Uh, you know, it's just a punk. He couldn't do anything with it He always power was useless because it couldn't get close But Paul is here saying the God's grace God's power has a long rack reach You can reach anybody Can reach anywhere Back in the 70s it reached into a Into a New York ghetto threw an evangelist named David Wilkerson He went and found the leader of a of a gang I called the Malmouse and he was talking to this guy. He had been abused his entire life was violent Violent and mean young man and and and this pastor started trying to share the gospel with him and and Nikki Cruz Spit in his face and started cussing him and telling him to get out of here and and Wilkerson wouldn't leave and Ricky Sorry threatening him And Wilkerson said you could cut me into a thousand pieces, but everyone else pieces would love you

And it awakened this desire in his heart He didn't even know what he was desiring But weeks later he took his entire gang to hear David Wilkerson preach and one by one they all went up there And he went up to the front and gave his life to Christ and he wept For the first time in his life he said I love you to somebody said I love you to Jesus And he left his life in the gangs and he went to Bible College and became a speaker traveling the country And he came to Tennessee and a young man went and hurt him Whose initials were mm and he thought the Malmouse were cool because their initials were mm

And so he just went to hear him because he wanted to hear these cool gang stories But while Cruz was speaking he started realizing that he needed a father that he didn't have He also realized he really wanted to go speak to this cute girl down front And she was a counselor and so he got up and went down front responding to the altar calls We could talk to her, but she wouldn't talk to him. She made a boy talk to him And the man the boy started talking to him about God the gospel and the fatherhood of God and And the young man gave his life to Christ 14 years old and then back at home That boy had a four-year-old brother a four-year-old brother who was Unashamedly wanted to be just like him And so when this kid started preaching at the youth Sunday every Sunday morning His little punk brother would Go home and preach to his stuffed animals He's not preaching to stuffed animals anymore. He's preaching to you

That's the long-long Jesus

It reached in the ghettos of New York and it reached Nikki Cruz and now it's reaching you And it will continue reaching And everybody it reaches it touches with that power of salvation and we don't have to be ashamed of it We don't have to be ashamed of it because it changes whatever it touches Secondly, we don't have to be ashamed of it Because it has a secret It has a secret you know and in our family we have a favorite movie with several favorite movies and one of them is a princess bride You can't be a Jones boy if you don't know every word to the princess bride And you know if you haven't seen it. There's a scene. It's about you know This guy who's trying to go and rescue his princess and it's a scene where he's he's got a mask on and he's in a sword fight And the two are fighting each other and he can he starts to say you know you're you're better swordsman than I am And the guy who's fighting against him says the winner. Why are you smiling? And he says because I have a secret I'm not left-handed You know he changes hands and he wins the sword fight We don't have to be ashamed of the gospel because it has a secret And that secret is the righteousness of God revealed It's the righteousness of God revealed now That's a hard text to get your to wrap your mind around There was a German monk by the name of Martin Luther who despised that text He said whenever he thought of the righteousness of God the only thing he could think was that the Lord was so holy And his eyes were so pure that he could not stand to look upon a center like him And no matter what he did He could not make himself worthy of God's God's even looking at him

And he he said he abhorred this text And to one day finally broke through to him that the law and the gospel were two separate things And that God by his grace was making him righteous and that the righteousness of God that was revealed was this That God was so overwhelmingly so unexpectedly good That he would maintain his own righteousness He would not compromise his holiness at all and yet would make unrighteous, unholy sinful people righteous That's what the righteousness of God means He said the gospel broke through to him and his heart Lapped and he and he sang for joy and his entire life was changed and and through him the entire Culture of Europe was changed Because God's righteousness this text could be read read like this because God has revealed His righteousness That he Righteously Makes righteous the unrighteous That's a terrible sentence I don't want you to memorize it What's it mean? It means God is righteous. He keeps his word. He is faithful He is promised to save a people for himself To make those people holy and to spend eternity with them and he has kept his word

He's kept his word. He hasn't left us alone What does it mean that God is righteous? It means that he has forgiven our sin in a way that is holy He hasn't just said ah Who cares? So you're bad He's judged sin He has condemned sin in his son. He's condemned sin in himself And he's punished it He placed all of our sin upon Christ Christ willingly took it He took it all for us And he punished it Christ paid our debt God hasn't just forgotten the debt. He's paid it for us It's righteous in the way that he's made his righteous and he's righteous because he's changed us You see we're not what we ought to be We're not what we ought to be When I was young I used to be building projects every now and then for my uncle and one time I was I was trying to put this wall up I didn't know this at the time. He was just trying to keep me out of his hair So I had me kind of putting this wall up and at the end of the day he dropped a plumb line You know a plumb line is uh, it's just a piece of string basically with something heavy at the bottom And always hanging straight thanks to gravity and uh So he held it up at the top of the wall right up next to the bricks and at the bottom of the wall is about you know that far away from the bricks Tells you my wall wasn't straight. Well that a plum But he was smart. He just took the most down and what he didn't really give me cement He just kind of gave me sand and brushed them off. He rebuilt it himself And that's what God's done He's held that plumb line up to you and he said you arrogant self-righteous perfectionistic merciless Graceless Prick You think you are straight and you judge everybody else by what you think Look how far out of plumb you are And he takes the will hold down and he rebuilds us in Christ All of Christ's righteousness all of his graciousness all of his love is put upon you When you think of that don't think about yeah, Jesus never said a bad word and that's put upon me That's More or less true Jesus never thought about himself His whole life was one long giving of himself to others And that's what's put upon you Of course yourself fish But when Jesus God sees you. He sees Jesus's love put upon you. He sees the wall that Jesus built He's made you righteous The righteousness of God is revealed you didn't get all that don't worry We're gonna study it for about the next 18 months. It's called the book of Romans We don't have to be ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God in the salvation It is the righteousness of God revealed and finally We don't have to be ashamed of the gospel because it's the only source of life This might be my favorite verse in all the Bible um Because it's the one I just go back to the most during counseling and and and all kinds of situations He says the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith As it is written the righteous shall live by faith From faith For faith For the righteous shall live by faith That's frustrating. I mean good night Paul. We get the idea that faith is important You say it three times, but what could that possibly mean? What could it possibly mean From faith for faith righteous shall live by faith Well, let's just take it apart. We got about eight minutes left. So let's take it apart First of all it means that you start by faith All right, you start You got to believe that it's true You got to believe that these are the words of life If you don't believe that these are the words of life if you don't believe that the Son of God came and As a man and and live the perfect life for you and died the death that you deserve if you don't believe that you don't even have a place to start It begins with faith But then it becomes something else It goes from faith to faith Some translations will say faith from first to the last From faith to faith others will say it goes from just believing that it happened believing the facts to actually entrusting yourselves to them It means you stop trusting in yourself And you start trusting in another the best illustration I can come up with the With for this Has to do with me in my former life when I was I was a very very cool good-looking don't laugh teenager and And I did what every cool good-looking teenager does during the summer. I was a lifeguard now being a lifeguard means you're gonna have you know You know just hundreds of beautiful girls looking up to you which was true, but they were all like eight, you know It really was not the job that I had imagined And it means you're gonna be important and you're gonna be saving lives which is true But They were all dumb and um What I mean by is this I was a lifeguard in a public pool You're never more than eight people in the wall. You really should never need help But and I never had to go in during the day. We'd have 300 kids in their splash around nobody ever got hurt It was always during private parties and what would happen would be this the same thing happened every time There would be a mother. I don't know why I was never a dad It was always a mother a mother who wanted to teach her child not to be afraid of the diving Board So she would swim out into a 11 feet of water And she would yell to her child Johnny jump to me Yeah, you see what was going, right And so Johnny jumps right on her face and she does what you do when someone jumps on her face She yells, but now she's underwater. So when she yells she's taking in water, right? And Johnny is squeezing on her head, but she's sinking So she's not helping him very much So I go in which you're not supposed to do So reach throw and go. I know, but I just jump in because there's two feet from the wall. I think I can handle this And I say Johnny grabbed me And Johnny's going like this And he realizes he's drowning and he looks at me and he goes oh, he's not drowning. Okay And he grabs hold of me And that embrace is faith That is faith He had to believe first of all that I was there right and then I could help him But that wasn't the faith that saved him. What saved him was embracing me trusting me That is saving faith When you're trusting the one who saves you We go on from faith to faith

And the beauty is I think he goes on to continue by saying as it is written The righteous shall live by faith which means you'll never get beyond it You'll never get past it There will never come a day when you don't need faith anymore And that may sound easier sitting in church. Oh, that's so sweet That's the hardest thing in the world Because every day what you want more than anything else and what I want more than anything else is to stop needing Jesus I just want to be fine I just want to know what to do and know that if I do things right everything's gonna work out. Why don't you feel that way? Just give me a book on how to raise my stinking children So I know they're all gonna grow up to be perfect godly wealthy young men who support their father That's what I need I don't want faith. I don't want to pray for them. I don't want to have to wait and see what God does with them I don't want to watch their hearts get broken I don't want to watch them struggle I don't want to go to them and tell them that I did it wrong and I'm sorry and you need to You know be aware of how I've messed you up and ask the Lord to heal that and move on. I just want to do it right I want to live by sight. I want to live by wall

In every day I come back and I look at the stuff. I was so proud of yesterday and I have to say It's unrighteous It's not enough and I let go of whatever it was that I was holding on to that was drowning Every day every day Yesterday I wrote a really good blog post It was good All right one good thing a year right it's okay for me to say that as an objective fact 99% of what I do and say and writes junked out of way but this was good You know what I have to do today It's not going to get me to heaven It's not my identity. It's not going to complete me Lance Armstrong's not going to read it I'm not going to be famous for it

Let go no no honey None of that's going to happen just let go and embrace Jesus And I have to do it again and again and this is the message for you and it's a message for me People ask sometimes do I have alter calls and the answer is yes. We have an alter call almost every week We call it communion And the reason why we do it that way is this if you think going to the alter once and giving your life to Jesus once was enough Then you don't get it We do it every day and so I'm going to invite you to come up here And take the Lord's Supper and by faith eat his body and by faith drink his blood and let his Righteousness and his sacrifice wash you clean Let him tell you that he loves you and you tell him that you love him And if this is the first time you've ever done that praise the Lord. I'm so excited. Please come and tell me I'm going to help you on a walk with you. I want to give you some good books to read and Get you together with some people who can disciple you And if this is the 10,000th time that you've done that that is awesome praise the Lord. Please come tell me You don't want to keep you walking that way too We're all going to do this together. Please pray with me