How ‘bout them Blazers! They beat Golden State 113-100 before a sellout crowd of over twenty thousand in the Rose Garden. The Portland Trailblazers are now 22-14 for the season, inching up on first place Denver in their division. Portland is a basketball town once again. The team is winning and it’s hard these days to get a ticket. But a lot of us remember not too long ago a derogatory nickname for this team: The Jailblazers.
When they won the NBA championship and on into the early 1990s the team could do no wrong. Everyone was so proud of them. They made the playoffs almost every year from 1976 to 2003. We’d come to depend on them. Then a series of events took place in the management and makeup of the team. Members started getting arrested for drugs and there were accusations of sexual misconduct and violence. That team we depended on had disappointed us. Attendance dried up and we hung our heads and no longer spoke openly about our team. We were ashamed of them.
Things are different now but I want to bring to mind that era of shame because for some reason, that same feeling of embarrassment, sadness, and disappointment is not confined to the basketball court. For some, the initial excitement they feel after joining the winning team in the universe fades. Maybe it’s the bad behavior of fellow teammates, or we don’t win games in the way we thought we would, or we start receiving jeers from our friends for even joining the team. We feel shame and disappointment and we confine our activities to the locker room and out on the court of life we just wear our street clothes and not the team uniform.
It’s that feeling of shame that Paul combats strongly in Romans 1:16-17. And I hope his feeling of exuberance infects us. Believe it or not, verses 16 and 17 of Romans 1 sum up the entire book of Romans. The foundation for the rest of what we read is found in these two verses.
We saw in verses 1 – 15 that Paul was just like everyone else, a man saved by Jesus Christ, who joined God’s team and now had an assignment, but one that he loved—fellowshipping with the saints and communicating the truth of who Jesus is. Why did Paul love his job so much? We see that revealed in these two short verses—basically that what God has done through Jesus is so incredible that everyone should know about it and embrace it, and not feel ashamed about it. Let’s read verses 16-17.
Why are we ashamed of the gospel?
Shame – comes from being disappointed in something we have trusted in (UBS)
• People will openly ridicule our faith. (you’re in good company)
• Friends might desert us if they know we are Christians. (you have a new family now)
• Christians have a reputation as poor examples or hypocrites. (Jesus is the example to follow, not “in process” people)
• Our faith is something private rather than public.
• Our success or achievement is worth more to us than having others know we are Christians. (what better achievement could there be than what Jesus already did for us?)
So why is Paul not ashamed? It’s because of what the gospel does?
Power = dunamis (dynamite, dynamic) “that which overcomes resistance” It comes from a root word that means “to be able.”
The dynamite part means the gospel has power.
Luke 20:18 Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him." It breaks or crushes—your choice
The dynamic part means the gospel brings change to a heart, and change that we cannot quantify or put in a box. We can’t predict just how God will work in someone’s life—that makes it exciting and scary! But it’s a change from death to life—and that brings us to the idea of what the gospel does, it saves us.
Salvation (rescue or safety)
Forgiveness of sins, making us whole again. (“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace” Ephesians 1:7)
Restoration of life (“I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly” John 10:10)
To everyone (all, any, every) who believes
Belief is the word Pistuo and it means faith or reliance upon something. to think to be true; to be persuaded of; to credit, place confidence in (from Thayer’s Greek Lexicon). You don’t get salvation by osmosis, you get it by believing and relying on Jesus’ gift of salvation through His sacrifice on the cross. As Paul will say later:
Romans 10:9-10 If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
To the Jew first and also to the non-Jew
Does it mean the Jews are somehow better or first in line at the salvation well? No. It means the Jews were given the privilege of showing the world the true nature of God, receiving His Word, and birthing the Savior. But every Jew has to come to salvation the way everyone else does. But they did get the message first.
Matthew 15:24 "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
Yet they were to take the message of the Messiah well beyond their borders:
Acts 1:8 “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth."
The wonderful thing is that you are actually grafted into the blessings God gave to Abraham (and by extension Israel) in Genesis 12 and other places. Paul talks about this in more detail later in chapter 4. They should have welcomed the Messiah but they mostly rejected Him. Though Paul was sent to the Gentile (Acts 9) he went to the Jews first when he visited a city.
So the gospel is a dynamic power to alter our history and our destiny by bringing us into an incredible life through the forgiveness of sin and the injection of eternal life. Now we see a little bit more how that happens in verse 17.
17
Understanding (“revealed”) how sinful we are, and how pure God is, and how God can cleanse us of our sins, is the subject of the rest of the book. Here Paul is talking both about God’s righteousness and the righteousness that God’s gives those who have faith in him.
“Righteousness” means “the state of him who is as he ought to be” (Thayer). God created us in His image. After the disobedience in the Garden of Eden we fell and were no longer as we were created. Through the gospel, God puts us back to the way we should be. Our character becomes like God’s character (righteousness), “integrity, virtue, purity of life, uprightness, correctness of thinking, feeling, and acting.” (Thayer).
Anything that is not pure cannot exist in God’s presence (Exodus 33:20 “For man shall not see me and live.”). It is only by the purification that comes with receiving the gospel (“good news”) of Jesus Christ that we are once again made like God and can see Him and exist in His presence.
1 John 3:2-3 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. 3 And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.
“From faith for faith.” Some suggest this means God first had faith and then we responded. That’s possible, but the Greek phrase is somewhat ambiguous and is translated correctly in the ESV. The idea is more likely that this righteousness through the gospel starts and ends with faith. We cannot make ourselves righteousness. God doesn’t make us clean then send us back out the door so we can keep ourselves clean. Our righteousness begins when we trust in Jesus. It never becomes works, but faith is always the source of our life.
“The righteous shall live by faith” quotes Habakkuk 2:4. That verse actually says “Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith.”
Habakkuk has been complaining to God that evil people seem to succeed. God answers him in part with these words and says, basically, that evil will be accounted for and judged and that “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” He talks about the foolishness of trusting in a dead idol when there is a living God.
So you could translate that to say “the person who has become righteous through faith in God will really live.” Trusting in anything or anyone else (including yourself) will only lead to disappointment and death.
Conclusions
Faith Is Not:
Religion, obedience, ceremony, appearance, genetic, a club
Fait is not self confident
Faith Is
Counterintuitive. The default position is self reliance. Faith is Christ reliance.
Faith is freeing when you finally realize you are incapable but God is capable on your behalf and you transfer trust away from you to Him.
So how do we overcome the “shame” of the gospel?
Don’t underestimate the power of the gospel
You hold a mighty weapon in your hand.
Don’t hold back the power because of your own experience or concern.
It’s not a matter of getting “pumped up” for the team, though there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a matter of realizing you hold the information about a cure for the terminal illness that is the human condition in a fallen world.
(see “reasons for being ashamed” above)
John 6:66-70 After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.67 So Jesus said to the Twelve, "Do you want to go away as well?" 68 Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God."
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