Good morning. Please open your Bibles to Romans, chapter 1. We are beginning a new series today. I want to preach through the book of Romans.
There is a joke among pastors, whenever they hear that someone is going to start a series on Romans. They say whenever you start a series on Romans, you need to make sure you have both your will and your resume up to date (Ok—I didn’t say it was a funny joke). The point is that a series on Romans is a major undertaking. Martyn Lloyd Jones was a pastor in England. On October 7, 1955, he began a sermon series on Romans. 13 years later, he had gotten to Romans 14 (Romans has 16 chapters) before he retired from preaching because of illness. He spent the rest of his life editing his sermon manuscripts, and died in 1981. His sermons, which averaged 55 minutes each, are collected in a fourteen volume set.
So Romans has killed some pastors, and run off others. I actually know a lot of guys who, every time they do a series on Romans, they get called to another church before they finish it.
Let me ease your mind on both counts. First, I’m not planning to spend the next 13 years on Romans. And second, I don’t have any plans to go anywhere.
But I do want to spend a lot of time with this book. As I sat down over the Christmas break to map out my sermons for 2022, I’ve got us going through at least September.
So let me recommend one more thing to you as well. We’ve ordered a number of these ESV Scripture journals. Students, you guys are already familiar with these, because you’ve been using them in youth bible study for awhile now. But this [hold it up] is the text of the book of Romans, and every other page of the journal is blank, so you can make your own notes, highlights, etc. They are five dollars each, and since we are going to be in this book for awhile, I think this will be a great resource for you to keep notes in. If you decide you want one of the journals, I will have them after the service.
So why attempt this? Because the book of Romans has done more to actually change the course of church history than any other single book of the Bible. Consider this:
St. Augustine is probably the most influential theologian after the Apostle Paul. In 386 AD, after years of seeking truth in philosophy and hedonism, Augustine heard two children on the playground chanting, “Take and read, take and read.” Augustine picked up a copy of the book of Romans, and randomly turned to Romans 13:13-14, which says, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the lusts of the flesh.” He marked his conversion from that point.
A thousand years later in Germany, a monk named Martin Luther was depressed almost to the point of suicide. He had tried to pursue righteousness through strict self discipline, and found himself hating the idea of the righteousness of God because he could never measure up to it. Then he started meditating on Romans 1:17, which we will talk about next week. It talks about how the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel. From that point on, Luther wrote, “I felt myself to be reborn, and to have gone through the open doors of Paradise.”
At roughly the same time as Luther, William Tyndale was over in England working on an English translation of the Bible. This was almost a century before the King James Version: William Tyndale was the first person to translate the Bible into English directly from the Hebrew and Greek, and was burned at the stake for doing so. But he believed that everyone should have access to God’s Word—not just Latin scholars. So here’s what Tyndale wrote about Romans: Tyndale wrote, “It is the principal and most excellent part of the New Testament, and I think it [appropriate] that every Christian know it by heart and exercise himself therein continually, as daily bread for the soul. No man can read it too often or study it too well; for the more it is studied the easier it is; the more it is chewed the pleasanter it is, and the more it is searched the more precious are the things found in it.”
John Calvin wrote that Romans was “the entrance to all the most hidden treasures of Scripture.”
John Bunyan wrote “Pilgrim’s Progress” after studying Romans.
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, and, along with his brother Charles the writer of more than six thousand hymns including “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” was converted to Christ in 1738, while reading Luther’s introduction to the book of Romans. He wrote in his journal, “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ and Christ alone for my salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
More recently John Stott talked about his love hate relationship with the book, because some of its personal challenges were so painful. But I think this is so powerful, and so necessary for us to hear (or at least for me to hear as a preacher):
“It was Paul’s devastating exposure of universal human sin and guilt in Romans 1:18-3:20 which rescued me from the kind of superficial evangelism which is preoccupied only with people’s ’felt needs.’”
So, why study Romans? Because the church needs more thinkers like Augustine. She needs more reformers like Luther and Calvin.
The church needs writers like Bunyan and musicians like Wesley. And she needs more preachers who are committed to the gospel and not to superficial evangelism and meeting felt needs.
So Here we go. Romans 1, verses 1-7. We’ve already read the scripture together, so let me pray for us, and then we are going to look at three questions that the first 7 verses of Romans answers, and what that means for us. Let’s pray:
[pray]
1st Question: Who Was Paul?: Now, we are going to spend a lot of time next week on Paul, but let’s look at how he introduces himself:
“a servant of Christ Jesus.” Not “Paul, eminent theologian, brilliant logician, superstar missionary.” Just a servant. The Greek word doulos meant slave, and it was generally thought of to be the lowest rung on the social ladder.
It’s so interesting to me that this is how Paul described himself, because its really different from how we tend to describe ourselves. There’s a scene in The Beverly Hillbillies where this arrogant doctor is introducing himself to Jethro and Uncle Jed. He says, “My name is Dr. Robert Smith—MD, PhD.” Jethro looked at Uncle Jed and said, “I know I ain’t all that smart, but even I know that ain’t how you spell Smith.”
We want to make ourselves sound impressive. But that so wasn’t who Paul was. Even with all his credentials, which we will talk about next week, he still saw himself as “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus”
But then he goes on to say that he is “called to be an apostle.” The Greek word for apostle is apostelo, and it means “one who is sent out.” Specifically, it referred to a delegate or an ambassador who was dispatched under the authorization of a ruler with specific orders.
People are divided on whether or not there are still apostles today. Some Christians believe that once the twelve apostles, and Paul, and Timothy and Barnabas died, nobody else should have that title. And personally, I get a little nervous when ministers today take on that title, especially if they give it to themselves.
But I think there’s a difference between the office of apostle and the role of an apostle. if you skip down to verse 5, Paul says that “we have received grace and apostleship” from Jesus. If “apostle” means a representative of a king who is sent out with orders from that king, then aren’t we all apostles? Don’t we all have a Great Commission and a Great Commandment? Man, if we don’t, or if you don’t believe that you are called to the role of apostle, what are we even doing here?
Which brings us to the third description Paul uses for himself: set apart for the gospel of God. It’s interesting that Paul uses this word, because he began his career as a Pharisee, a Hebrew word which means “one who is set apart.” The Pharisees were the guys who were so committed to holiness that when they walked through the market they would walk like this [hands clutching their robes] so they wouldn’t accidentally come into contact with anything unclean. And so Paul still sees himself as set apart. Only now, he’s not set apart by trying to keep the law. He’s set apart for the gospel.
So to recap, Paul saw himself as a set apart, sent out servant of Jesus. And if you were to write a job description for a Christian today, wouldn’t that fit? Don’t we exist to serve Jesus? Aren’t we dispatched to the world with a message from Jesus? And aren’t we meant to live lives that are distinct from the world? Set apart from the world? Lives that are so unique and different from those around us that they point to Jesus?
We’ve talked about Paul. Now, let’s talk about this gospel. Verse 1-2 says, “set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy scriptures.”
So, what is the gospel? Gospel is the Greek word euangellion, and it means “good message.” Specifically, “gospel” refers to a royal proclamation of good news. It often referred to when an army was fighting far away from the city they were defending. If the king’s armies won the battle, then a euangellion would be dispatched to take the message of victory back to the city. He would say, “The war is over. The enemy has been defeated. The siege is lifted!”
If the army lost, they wouldn’t send a “good messenger,” they would send a malangellion. A bad messenger.
Gospel means “good news.” And Paul makes some things very clear in these first two verses.
First, the gospel is the gospel of God. As we get into Romans, especially the rest of Romans 1 that we’ll get to in a couple of weeks, its going to be really clear that this was not something that human beings just made up. Think about it. If we were making up the gospel, we would say, “Good news! God loves you. You’re ok just the way you are. And if you’re just nice to people and try to be a good person, you get to go to heaven when you die.”
No. You’ll see in verse 18 that God’s gospel begins with the wrath of God being revealed against ungodliness and unrighteousness. If the gospel came from man, it wouldn’t start that way. Remember the quote from John Stott—this is not a gospel about meeting felt needs. Yes, the rebellion is defeated, but we are the rebels. As CS Lewis puts it, the gospel is a call for rebels to lay down their arms.
Second, the gospel is revealed in Scripture. Paul says, it’s the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures. See, the gospel is good news, but it isn’t new news. When you put your faith in the gospel, you are putting your faith in a truth that has been established for thousands and thousands of years. The first recorded prophecy of Jesus goes all the way back to Genesis 3:15. Compare that to other world religions and cults.
• Islam was established 600 years after the resurrection of Jesus.
• Mormonism, which got its start in 1830.
• Jehovah’s Witnesses- 1872.
• Scientology—1953.
• Alabama football, 1892
Our faith is built on a firm foundation. Prophets who foresaw the coming of Christ. Apostles who preached and taught about the risen Christ.
And that’s the next distinguishing feature about the the gospel: It’s about Jesus. In verses 3-4. Paul says the gospel of God, concerns His son
3 who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,
In other words, the gospel is about a real live, flesh and blood, historical person, Jesus. You can trace his family tree. You can visit the place he was born. We aren’t just invited to learn a philosophy or a teaching, like Buddhism. The gospel is about a person.
I do want to explain a little about verse 4, to avoid confusion. When Paul says that Jesus was “declared to be the son of God by his resurrection from the dead,” that doesn’t mean that Jesus only became the divine son of God when He rose from the grave. We know from John 1:1 that Jesus was in the beginning with God. God the Son has always existed as the Second Person of the Trinity. But the resurrection is the singular event that removes all doubt and declares that Jesus is exactly who he says He is.
It’s kind of like when World War II ended on August 7, 1945. I believe the outcome of the war was decided on December 8, 1941. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war, I think the defeat of Japan and Germany was sealed in that moment. But when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima three and a half years later, victory was declared. The enemy said, “there is no way I can continue to fight against such decisive power.”
And that’s what the resurrection was. Jesus had always been the son of God. But the resurrection absolutely, fully, finally, decisively, indisputably, irrevocably declared that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
And that brings us to our last question. Why did God reveal the gospel? Why would the eternal son of God leave His heavenly home and come to earth?
I use the word “reveal” very intentionally. We don’t discover the gospel on our own. The gospel was graciously revealed to us through Jesus Christ. Notice verse 5:
5 through whom we have received grace and apostleship…
The verse says we have received grace. It doesn’t say we’ve earned salvation. Friends, I know I am spending a whole lot of time on just a few verses, and some of you are going, “wow—he really is planning to spend thirteen years on this…” But these first few verses are so important, because they really are the outline for the next sixteen chapters.
We receive grace and apostleship as a gift. Grace is unmerited, unearned, undeserved favor. And apostleship, as we’ve already discussed, is the commission to represent a ruler and carry out his orders.
The gospel is not revealed to us so we can sit and soak. It’s revealed to us in order for us to be sent out and served. The purpose for the gospel being revealed is right here in verse five:
to bring about the obedience of faith: This is the “what” of the gospel. Obedience is what salvation looks like. Salvation is by faith and not by works. But salvation is FOR good works, according to Ephesians 2:10. To be saved by grace is to walk in a way that is different from the world. To live in obedience to the commands of our king. Martin Luther said “Salvation is by faith alone, but faith that saves is never alone. It is always accompanied by obedience and good works.
for the sake of his name. This is the “why” of the gospel. The name of Jesus is worthy of all our praise. All our affection. All our priorities. All our attention. Bringing glory to Jesus isn’t just number one on our to do list as Christians. It’s the very pad of paper that every to-do list is written on!
among all the nations, This is the “where” of the gospel. Revelation 7:9 describes the throne room in heaven, when those from every tribe, tongue, and nation will be gathered before the lamb and singing His praise. The gospel isn’t just for Glynwood. It’s not just for Alabama. It’s not just for Americans. It’s not just for Republicans. The gospel is to be proclaimed among all the nations.
Paul ends with, 6including you, who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. Paul wants the Gentiles who are in Rome to know that the gospel includes them. The church in Rome was made up of Jews and Gentiles, and Paul wanted them to know that they were included.
And that’s where we end this morning. I want you to know that you are included, both in receiving the gospel and proclaiming the gospel. God revealed the gospel so you could receive the gospel. God loves you, and He wants to be known by you. He wants to have a relationship with you!
But if you already have a relationship with Christ, then remember verse 6: we are to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of the name among all the nations!
We receive the gospel so we can proclaim the gospel. Never forget that the gospel came to you on the way to someone else.
Do you remember how we defined the gospel earlier? We said the gospel was the royal proclamation that the war was over, and that is was time for rebels to lay down their arms. I want to close with a story. I want to tell you about Hiroo Onoda.
When WW2 ended in August of 1945, Hiroo Onoda was part of a small group of elite soldiers on Lubang Island, one of hundreds of tiny islands in the Philippines. Allied planes began dropping leaflets all over these islands. The leaflets read, “The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains.”
Hiroo and his fellow soldiers found one of these leaflets in October 1945. But Hiroo didn’t believe it. He and three of his companions went deeper into the mountains and vowed to keep on fighting. But one by one, the three other soldiers either surrendered or were shot by Filipinos, until only Hiroo was left.
In the spring of 1974, when a young Japanese student named Noria Suzuki set out to find Hiroo Onoda. He told his friends he wanted to find Hiroo Onoda, a panda bear, and the Abominable Snowman, in that order.
He found one out of three. Here he is, with Hiroo Onoda, twenty-nine years after the war ended. He tried to convince Hiroo that the war ended before Suzuki had even been born. Hiroo refused to believe it. He said he would only surrender if his commanding officer told him to.
So they found Hiroo’s CO and flew him to Lubang Island. And in March, 1974, Onoda turned his sword over to his commanding officer. The rebellion was over, and it was time to lay down his arms.
Some of you need to do that same thing. The gospel is a proclamation that the war is over. The enemy has been defeated, and Jesus has won the victory. And maybe this morning has been just the first leaflet that you’ve found. If so, keep coming back to church this year. Or maybe you’re ready to surrender and accept the reign of Christ in your life. If so, we want to help you do that.
