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MBC - 5~/20~/2004 - Pastor Doug Thompson
*/“Not Ashamed of the Gospel”/*
Romans 1:16,17
 
Ø      ROM 1:14 I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish.
Ø      ROM 1:15 So, for my part, I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.
Ø      ROM 1:16 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.
Ø      ROM 1:17 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."
[And this could be read, “The man who is righteous by faith, shall live.”
In Rome there is a cathedral called St. John of Lateran.
There is a staircase in this church that the Roman Catholic church says is the very staircase that Christ climbed to appear before Pontius Pilate.
The Catholic church says that the Crusaders brought this staircase back from Jerusalem to Rome--which is not supported by Scripture, archaeology, or architecture!
But for hundreds of years, poor pilgrims had been climbing this staircase on bloody knees, saying a prayer on each step to do penance for their sins.
Martin Luther was one of those pilgrims.
His son, Dr. Paul Luther wrote about that experience:
 
“Wishing to obtain an indulgence promised by the Pope to all who shall ascend the so-called Pilate’s staircase on their knees, the good monk is painfully creeping up those steps, which, he is told, were miraculously transported from Jerusalem to Rome.
While he is performing this meritorious act, however, he thinks he hears a voice of thunder crying, “The just shall life by faith!
The just shall live by faith!” [from Rom.1:17]
These words struck him like the voice of an angel from heaven, and resounded unceasingly and powerfully within him.
He rises in amazement from the steps up which he is dragging his body; he shudders at himself; he is ashamed at seeing to what depth superstition plunged him.
He flies far from the scene of his folly.”
That was just the beginning of Luther’s spiritual awakening--he wrote this:
 
Meanwhile . . .
I had begun interpreting the Psalms once again.
I was confident that I was now more experienced, since I had dealt in university courses with St. Paul's Letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the Letter to the Hebrews.
I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his Letter to the Romans, but thus far there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word which is in chapter one: "The righteousness of God."
I hated that word, which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to that righteousness by which God is righteous and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.
But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience.
I couldn't be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction.
I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners.
In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God.
I said, "Isn't it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments?
Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?"
This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience.
I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.
I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: "The righteousness of God is revealed in it, as it is written: 'The righteous person lives--by faith.'"
I began to understand that in this verse the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. . . .
i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: "The righteous person lives by faith."
All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates.
Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light.
I exalted this sweetest word of mine, "the righteousness of God," with as much love as before I had hated it with hate.
This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate of paradise.”
It wasn’t just Luther who was re-born, the church was re-born as Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Knox, and other Reformers, rediscovered the Gospel in the Scriptures and proclaimed it throughout Europe.
And it proved to be exactly what Paul said it is, the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.
I want you to leave here this morning not only understanding the Gospel, but with an unashamed confidence to share it with others because it is God’s gospel, and it has His power to save anyone who will believe it.
~* ~* ~* ~*
We tend to speak of “the gospel” as a four- or five-point outline of salvation truths.
The gospel is the formula that gets you saved.
But in Romans (and the rest of the NT), we see that the gospel includes all the revealed truth about Jesus Christ.
It doesn’t stop at the point of conversion, but it embraces every other aspect of salvation, from justification to sanctification to glorification.
The gospel’s significance for a Christian doesn’t end the moment the new birth occurs; it applies to the entire Christian life.
So when Paul talks about “preaching the gospel,” he wasn’t just talking about evangelistic preaching to unbelievers.
Look at v. 15: He was eager to preach the gospel to the Christians--those who were already saved--in Rome!
 
Beloved, there is nothing that unbelievers need more than the gospel, and there is nothing that believers need more than the gospel, in all its richness and depth, which is what we are going to find in Romans.
I want you to get the flow of this passage.
In v.15, Paul says: “I am eager to come and preach the Gospel to you who are in Rome,”
 
For [Because] I am not ashamed of the Gospel,
 
For [Because] it is God’s power to save everyone who believes,
 
For [Because] it is the revelation of God’s imputed righteousness through faith in Christ.
We’re going to take it phrase by phrase this morning--
 
*I.**
“For I am not ashamed of the Gospel.”
*
 
Why does Paul even say this?
Maybe some of the Christians in Rome wondered if Paul hadn’t visited them because he was a bit embarrassed to take such a simple message to such a great and glorious city.
Certainly Paul knew that the Romans looked upon Christianity as a crude, uncul-tured religion.
In the first century, rumors circulated among Roman society that Christians were cannibals, because they ate flesh and drank blood in a strange ritual--the Lord’s Supper.
They were accused of incest and immorality because they called each other brother and sister and talked so much about love.
They were accused of being traitors and disloyal to the emperor because they claimed to have only one Lord, Jesus Christ, and they were called atheists because they wouldn’t bow down to any of the Roman gods.
Ø      Archaeologists discovered graffiti on an ancient Roman wall.
It was a picture of a man bowing down before a man on a cross who has the head of a donkey.
Underneath, it says, “Alexamenos worships his god.”
Ø      In the second century, a man named Celsus wrote a letter mocking Christians: [They say] “Let no cultured person draw near, none wise, none sensible. . .
for all that kind of thing we count evil; but if any man is ignorant, if any is wanting in sense and culture, if any is a fool, let him come boldly to Christ!”
 
Ø      He went on about Christians: “We see them in their own houses, wool dressers, cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and vulgar persons.
They are like a swarm of bats, like ants crawling out of their nests, like frogs holding a symposium around a swamp, like worms cowering in the muck!”
But apart from the lies and rumors, the gospel message /is/ intrinsically disagreeable.
It exposes sin, condemns pride, and shows human righteousness—even the best, most appealing aspects of human nature—to be worthless, defiled, filthy rags (cf Isa.64:6).
The gospel says that we can’t blame anyone else for our failure and misery.
It goes on to say that we are weak and helpless to save ourselves, we don’t even /want/ to change.
And we can only be saved by unconditionally surrendering and throwing ourselves upon  the mercy of Jesus Christ.
And how does that save us?
Well the gospel says that Jesus, a Jew born in poverty in Bethlehem, was man and God, He lived a perfect life, died on a cross for sins, and rose again to ascend to the right hand of God in heaven.
Anyone who trusts in Him will be saved.
That is an insult to modern philosophy, psychology, it’s politically incorrect, and well, it’s just not . . .
tolerant!
Paul says in 1 Cor.1:18 that “the word of the cross is /foolishness/ to those who are perishing.”
Beloved, that has not changed in 2,000 years!
Get the message right, preach it accurately, straight from the Word of God, and many people will say “That’s ridiculous--you should be ashamed!”
That’s the reaction Paul got when he preached the gospel--
 
Ø      He had already been imprisoned in Philippi, run out of Thessalonica, smuggled out of Berea, and laughed at in Athens.
In Acts 26:24, when Festus heard Paul preach the gospel--“Festus said in a loud voice, ‘Paul, you are out of your mind!
Your great learning is driving you mad.’”
 
Ø      Janice was at a meeting this week with some other teachers.
She was having lunch with two other teachers who are Christians (one of them was Natalie Jetter, who has sung here with her husband Norvelle), when their boss (who is not a believer) came up and began asking questions about what “Bible churches” believe.
These ladies took the cue and began to share the gospel.
They were explaining that at our churches, we don’t try to entertain people, and we don’t cut corners on the truth.
She said, “What do you mean?” Natalie said, “Well, some churches only talk about positive things, but we teach the Bible and that includes things like Rom.3:23: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
 
Ø      That pretty much ended the conversation!
But does that mean that they garbled the message?
Not at all!
The Gospel is not a /popular/ message, but it is a /powerful/ message.
That’s why /Paul was not ashamed of the gospel!/
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