Well, please, would you have, though, in front of you, the passage from Romans chapter one we had read a little bit earlier We begin a new series today in this magnificent letter of church Paul to the church in Rome and The book of Romans is a book that has had a powerful effect on the shape of Christian history Down through the centuries it has always been revered. It's been perhaps Paul's greatest and clearest statement of Christian theology You think of somebody like an Augustine, for example, he was brought up in a Christian home that as many teenagers do Unfortunately, he rebelled. It's not a new thing and he wasn't at all interested in the faith of his parents He heard the words of a child's game in the park told a leg told a leg told a leg and that means pick up and read He picked up the New Testament and he happened to turn to Romans chapter 13 and verse 13 and was Shaken awake by these words which convinced him that the life he was living was Not acceptable to God because as he opened his Bible he read let us behave decently as in the daytime not in orgies and drunkenness not in sexual immorality and debauchery not in dissension and jealousy Augustine had a good Christian upbringing and those words hit in between the eyes and he came and said sorry to God convinced that his sin was offensive to him Moving down the centuries we come to a Martin Luther who is most famously known for his association with the book of Romans He became a monk out of a sincere desire to find God He had a tormented soul and he went through all sorts of spiritual disciplines hoping that they would lead him to God On one occasion he was riding along on his horse and he was hit by lightning And he promised to God Savely and I'll become a monk. I'll commit my life to serving you And so his spiritual discipline and his activity began but he still could not find peace with God He studied diligently and and it got a PhD in the New Testament became a professor in the University of Wittenburg And he was preparing to preach on this book of the Bible the book of Romans to his students And eventually he came to Romans chapter one and verse 17 In which he in his preparations read these words For in the gospel a righteousness from God has revealed A righteousness that is by faith from first to last Just as it is written the righteous will live by faith And Martin Luther speaks in his journal about the profound effect that verse had upon him Because he believed in a righteous God He believed that God was out there, that God was holy, that God was just, that God was sovereign That God was to be feared Separate completely from us But as Martin Luther began to study this passage he began to appreciate for the first time that this passage doesn't speak about God's righteousness, his distance from himself from us But rather it speaks about the righteousness which God gives To make the unrighteous right It is the gifts that he gives to make those who are not right in his sight right before him And he wrote when I understood that And when the concept of justification by faith alone burst into my mind Suddenly it was like the doors of paradise swung open and I walked through And a couple of centuries later to this country And John Wesley speaks of his conversion experience Was partly kind to understand Romans chapter one He walked in that meeting in all this gate Where his heart was strangely warmed It was for the first time He understood the good news about Jesus
What is it that makes this book so powerful? What is it that attracts creatures to preach on it It is because it is a book that is preemantly about the gospel The gospel in a nutshell is God's plan to make the unrighteous righteous I don't think you noticed in those first 17 verses on six occasions Paul uses the word the gospel Paul talks about him being set apart for the gospel of Christ At the gospel of God in verse one In verse two he talks about the promise of God beforehand to reveal the message of the gospel in the sun In verse nine he speaks about his preaching the gospel of the sun And his joy in serving God with that message Verse 15 he speaks about his eagerness to preach the gospel to those who are at Rome And verse 16 he speaks about the gospel being the power of God for salvation And then verse 17 the gospel as a revelation of the righteousness of God The gospel is a message about Jesus Christ Who calls us in grace to faith and obedience There are three things a message it's very briefly to orientate us this morning that is so important The first is that salvation was promised by God verse two Well promised in the very beginning of time that he would raise up a savior ever since Enemy fell first in the garden. There was a promise that one day God would make the unrighteous righteous by his provision and the provision that he gave us to make us righteous was in the sun Verse 17 it's a revelation of God providing righteousness in the Lord Jesus And that was proved demonstrably in the verse four We're told by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead the greatest entity God says yes, I accept that payment of Christ's righteousness to make you right with me Now Paul had never visited the church in Rome but he clearly wants to do so and if he wouldn't Rome was the center of the then-dome world There was already a church in existence and the great pioneering apostle Is keen to go to the strategic place to make sure he meets the believers there who've come to faith He's on his way of course to Spain as well. He hopes where he will bring the gospel further into Europe But you would imagine wouldn't you that firstly his a church has been planted by others Paul is writing from the city of Corinth where his ministry is being constantly defamed by the teachers Around and he's going to this great center city You would think it would be somewhat intimidating And so Paul begins by sitting out a couple of benchmarks of them Which I think we need to make a priority for ourselves and those are both there in verse 16 and 17 Paul wants to say to them first of all that the gospel is nothing to be ashamed of Now you can probably think of various experiences in your own life Which of course you embarrassment or or shame And maybe the recollection of them just makes you shudder a little bit. So just to make you feel a bit Less uncomfortable. I'll tell you about one of my most embarrassing experiences When I left school and came to work in London I was invited out to dinner and on one occasion it was with A chapter was changed to be a chef and there were half a dozen of us at this dinner party And We sat down to a very nicely decorated table and the starter was prawns And I still go pink with embarrassment when I think about it The chapter very delicately peels all these prawns and he'd left one unpeeled prawn on the side of the dish And I got down through all my prawns And I wasn't exactly quite sure what to do with this Chaps sitting on the side of my plate staring up for those little black eyes at me So I took my heart and my hands and I lifted up the Offending item and put the whole prawn in my mouth And I chewed and I chewed and I chewed I am asked for a third glass of water I drank and drank and I ate about a three-course of a French loaf of bread and I eventually went And got it down and I hadn't really noticed apart from the fact that that wasn't the thing to do That the other five people around the table were just looking at me as if wondering where this backward person from Jersey have come from And whenever I see a prawn that sort of brings out those horrifying memories As I think about it shameful awful as social faux pas Well, I have more shameful experiences that I wouldn't share in public and load out you do too Where we think of ways in which we're embarrassed and humiliated Now Paul is talking here about the impact of the message of Jesus Christ And he's saying that for many people this is a shameful thing For the gospel is offensive to our religious sensibilities And many people are embarrassed the shamed by this message Let me just give you an illustration. I mean imagine for a moment that you are a member of the All England tennis club Imagine that you are privileged enough to get tickets every year to send to court And that you are used to using that privilege and you hardly bat an eyelid about What those privileges mean to you personally But I imagine on one occasion that you're coming there for the semi-finals of London tennis fall night and you go to the The gate And the asher says I'm sorry, but but you haven't got tickets today And he proceeds to to walk to the very back of the queue and start giving out all the tickets free of charge How to imagine you would be slightly upset about that Your privilege being thrown back in your face And these are love starts who've been camping out getting them and not even having to pay for them How humiliating it would be for you Or imagine that you've had your name on the waiting list to be a member of Wimbledon Park golf course for years You've remodeled your house so that you can afford to join And the membership secretary starts Wondering around the pitch and putt And starts baffling people off the pitch and pat and says yeah, don't stop messing around that little course They come on have a around on the golf course here and do feel free to use it whenever you want shameful What are all full things to do? Wouldn't you be just slightly annoyed if that went on?
But Paul says that those feelings of shame are offered experienced by people when they consider the gospel of Jesus Christ Paul Must have written this because he must have at least had a hint of temptation to at times be ashamed of this message For this message really offers the same brace That it was being offered by the Steward Wimbledon or at the golf course It is going to those who are unworthy and offering them free of charge The gospel the good news Righteousness from God And so those who thought that they'd been earning it all their life this came as a great slap in the face And so Paul could quite understandably as we first go to Rome feel at least a bit of temptation to be slightly embarrassed By this message Now I suggest that do you feel that too? I know that I feel it I go to people with religious sensibilities and say to them that they're actually your niceness Your religiosity is of no value Because the only way you'll be made right with God is through the three gifts of the sun. There's nothing you can do for it And God went to the back of the line To the Gentiles and offered it to them free of charge And understandably those with a great Jewish heritage would be offended And this context I think about our own society which in many ways has lost its sense of shame The list of sins that are mentioned in chapter 118 and following look at next week It was almost paraded in the media daily And yet we continue to be ashamed by this message Kind of topsy-turvy We're embarrassed by the good news of Jesus But yet don't seem to blush that the awful morality around us Religious people will be scandalized by this gospel But Paul believes it is powerful And that's the second thing he says here This gospel is the power of God for salvation Now you probably well know that the word in the Greek Do you know this is the same word which we get the English word dynamite Some of you may have come across a chap called Vijay Menon who I'm hoping will come speak with us at some point next year He is a very effervescent enthusiastic evangelist He became a Christian as a result of going to services at Helen's Bishop's Gate And had a very strongly religious Hindu background And now he goes around public schools in our country telling the The boys to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ In one occasion he was going through customs and only Vijay could do this And he was asked by the customs officer where they had anything to declare And Vijay picked up his briefcase and said yes, I have some dynamite And you can imagine he was very swiftly surrounded by angry looking officers And he opened up his briefcase and took out the Bible And he said this is dynamite you read this and it will blow your mind
Well, he's lucky you wasn't locked up But the word doonimus in the Bible is not so much the idea of blowing up of actually exploding But it's the idea of getting the job done powerful to cause the effect to produce the result When we moved into our house as a curate in Carlisle We had an old enamel stained bath And the site of the stains on it sort of didn't let you feel a whole lot cleaner once you got out So we went around the supermarket and my eye was caught by a sign Next to Ajax saying power to shift deep down stains So we took it back and liberally sprinkled it over the bath and with a couple of bottles of elbow grease as well continued to scrub and scrub in the hope they go away But it didn't and we ended up getting a new bathroom suite But my question was when I went around the shelf It's the same question I have when I think about the gospel of Jesus Which is can it do the job? Is it powerful to do what it promises? Ford is coming to Rome eager to spend his time speaking about Jesus Christ Because that message about Jesus can make the unrighteous Righteous it gets the job done the righteousness from God Imputed to those who are not righteous and it came like a thunderbolt to Luther And it should continue to be a sense of wonder to us. This is God's answer for unrighteousness Christianity as somebody has said is not primarily Do do do do do be good be nice But rather done It was done by God at the cross and it is offered to you As a free gift I still think about ways that I may be ashamed in my ministry and I wonder whether you resonate with these I think of times when I don't speak up for the uniqueness of Jesus When I don't speak out for or live myself for morally upright life that's pleasing to him I think of ways in which I might doubt his power That I do all sorts of other things and the activities of the life of the church They don't put the power of the gospel first And I put my confidence in all sorts of things to try to sort out my life to try to build the church That don't have the message of Jesus Christ at the center But as Paul prepares to go to this church in the center of the then-known worlds He wants to put first of all the gospel for his not ashamed of it And he believes that it is powerful Spurgeon apparently on one occasion took his students to see a wonderful painting of Christ on the cross And he fixed his students What do you see as you look at the canvas And the students would say things like well, I see the agony of Jesus hanging there on the cross I see the soldiers cheering and Shedding out his clothes I see Mary in her sorrow The two men either side And Spurgeon said some look again. What do you see? They thought they wondered and Spurgeon said You've not understood the cross until you see yourself hanging there For he stood in for you and me The righteous son of God in the place of the unrighteous And as we look at the cross we see a crucified savior And ourselves hanging there I see me The gospel gets the job done so don't be ashamed of it It is God's remedy