Romans chapter 1, verses 16 and 17 say the following. 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. For in it, it being the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith as it is written. The righteous shall live by faith. This passage is not only the distinctive theme of Paul’s letter to the Romans, we could go further to say that this passage could be viewed as a summary, a two verse summary of Paul’s entire theology. Paul’s entire theology, it’s all about the gospel, that in the gospel, we see God’s power and those who believe grab hold of this power, grab hold of this God, not by works, not by what they do, but by faith.
They find it by faith and they then live by faith. This is a massive text to lean into. I want to ask three questions of this passage and hopefully provide you three answers to these questions. Question one, why is Paul eager to preach the gospel in Rome? If you just back up one verse, in Romans chapter 1 verse 15 he says, so I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. Why is Paul eager to preach the gospel to Christians who live in Rome? Don’t they as Christians already know the gospel? Haven’t they already believed the gospel?
Well apparently, the answer is yes, of course, but apparently Paul thinks the gospel is something that Christians need to hear just as much as he knows that the gospel is something that non-Christians need to hear because for Paul, the gospel itself is not just a call for the lost to be saved, the gospel is a call for the saved to keep on living by faith. So this is why Paul is eager to preach the gospel in Rome. Rome, peculiar, special context for this letter. He would have known about all the immoral activity and social issues that were present and going on in Rome. Why didn’t he want to address those things? I mean, Rome was a city full of slavery. Didn’t Paul want to focus on the dignity of life? Rome was a city full of immorality.
Didn’t he want to focus on the proper use of God’s gift in sex? Rome was a city of economic prejudice. Didn’t Paul want to focus on the right use of means? Rome was a city of war. Didn’t Paul want to focus on the right use of might and just war? Rome was a city with all kinds of sin and social grievances. So didn’t Paul want to preach a gospel that was applicable to social realities? No. The first thing he says here, I am not ashamed of the gospel. I find this really encouraging. I think the Roman Christians are very much like you and I. They lived in a time when Rome was advanced and advancing.
The tide of culture was always seemingly coming in, strongly pushing an agenda out to every citizen to get in line with where we’re headed or be tossed to the lions in the Colosseum. In contrast to the power and the might and the opinion that Rome had of itself, nothing would have looked more foolish than a new up-and-coming religion that had at its centerpiece a crucified Savior. Yet, Paul says, I’m not ashamed of the gospel. Held in this statement is his honest confession. He’s tempted with being ashamed of the gospel. I think the Roman context is very similar to our modern-day context. This is a note from… 2017, but it still rings true today, every year the prestigious University, Oxford University, holds something that’s called the Freshers’ Fair.
This is where new incoming freshmen can see all the student activities and the student organizations that will be open to them on campus and their life there as a student. But in 2017 something new happened in Oxford University. They banned every Christian group from setting up a table at the fair and they said this in doing so. We recognize the wonderful advantages in having Christian representatives at the Freshers’ Fair, but we are concerned that there is potential for harm to incoming freshmen who are already struggling to feel welcome here at Oxford. Christianity’s influence on many marginalized communities has been damaging in its methods of conversion and rules of practice, and it is still used in many places in the world today as an excuse for homophobia and certain forms of neo-colonialism. This is not fake news. That’s a real quote.
It feels very first century Roman. Can you imagine incoming freshmen at Oxford hearing that, recognizing there’s going to be no Christian organizations at this Freshers’ Fair, and being tempted to be ashamed of the gospel? This is something of Paul’s heart here in verse 16. As the Romans were then, so are we now. Tempted to be ashamed of the gospel because the tide of the culture pushes against us. But again, in the face of this, Paul said he is unashamed. And so for his faith, Paul would be imprisoned, chased out of town, laughed at, regarded as a fool, stoned.
In the face of all this, he boldly declared to the Romans that he would not bow the knee to Rome’s agenda, that his deepest allegiance lies to the Lord no matter if it puts him at odds with the Romans that think they know the most important things in the world. He knows the Romans need Christ, and so he’s not ashamed of the gospel. This is one reason why Paul is so eager to preach the gospel to those in Rome, because he’s not ashamed of it. Now all that’s just kind of introduction. I remember we’re talking about Sola Fide. Look at where the verse goes in the rest of verse 16. This is our second question. Our first one was, why is Paul eager to preach in Rome? Second, why is Paul unashamed of the gospel? The rest of verse 16 gives the answer.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel. Why? For it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. So why is Paul not ashamed of the gospel? Because the gospel is power. The gospel is power. The word power in Greek is the word dunamis. Do you hear any other words in the word dunamis? What do you hear? Dynamite? What else? Sorry? Do? Okay. Do it. Just do it. Dynamite’s the main one, but we also get dynamic. Dynamic. These words come from this old ancient Greek word dunamis. It means that the gospel itself is power to actually do something. The gospel is not just a story, not a set of rules, not a philosophical system. It’s power. And it’s not just vague power. It’s a specific kind of power. The very power of God.
We can’t miss this. In the gospel, there is a power that lifts man out of and above the temptations of cowardice, shame, and fear. The very content of the gospel message itself creates a peaceful boldness, a power in us, wherever we find ourselves to be. But what does this power do? Right? Power is employed for something, for a purpose. In verse 16, what is What does the power do? The gospel is the power of God for salvation. The gospel’s power is a power that saves sinners. It’s a power that rescues, redeems, and transforms the soul. Who is this gospel power intended to save? Not all people. Not those who are born into certain families. Not those who live in certain countries. Not those who have certain skin color or are of a certain class in society.
Not even those who try to work their hardest to earn salvation. The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. Everyone who believes to the Jew first and to the Greek. To the biblical mindset, there are many ways to answer this question, but there are two kinds of people. There’s the Jew and the Greek. There’s the old covenant people of God, the Jews, the nation of Israel, new covenant, out to the nations. That’s what the word Greek is intended there. The nations, the ethnos. What comes forth in a strong clarity is this word believe right here in verse 16. The power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. This is faith. This is the centrality of faith. So faith therefore, what is faith? It doesn’t just know the right things, though there are right things to know.
Faith doesn’t just agree that those right things are right and true, even though we agree that those right things are right and true. Faith is not a sort of naming or claiming something for ourselves, no. True faith is more than just knowledge, more than just agreement with that knowledge. It’s a laying hold of that knowledge and banking our salvation on it. It’s a trust. It’s a clinging to this knowledge. True faith lays hold of the power of God in the gospel and clings to Christ as He stands forth in the gospel. This is a whole souled confidence in the God who not only makes commands and demands of us, but the God who also approves and provides all that is needed for our salvation in His Son, the Lord Jesus. So in this we see so much. We see two massive things coming out.
The power of God breaking into the plight of man. This is why Paul is not ashamed of the gospel. This is why he’s eager to encourage the Romans to not be ashamed of the gospel. And this is why I don’t want any of you to be ashamed of the gospel either. No one need blush at being the recipient of such power in the gospel of God received and rested in by faith alone. Paul proclaimed Christ in Corinth, the self-proclaimed wisest city in the ancient world. He proclaimed Christ to be the very wisdom of God. How ironic then in the self-proclaimed city of the mightiest city in the ancient world in Rome, to them, Paul says, Christ is the power of God for salvation. The gospel is the power of God. This leads to our last question.
We looked at verse 16 with two questions, now one question for verse 17. Why is the gospel the power of God for salvation? Look at verse 17. For in it, for in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. So the gospel is the power of God for salvation because in the gospel a righteousness is revealed. What kind of righteousness is this in verse 17? Is it the attribute of God’s righteousness in view that He always does what is right and that He Himself is the standard of all rightness in the world and that He’s always faithful to His promises? No. Could it be our own righteousness in view that we are… Have we ourselves, by our works and merit, earned a righteousness that puts us in right standing with God?
No. Then what is it? What is this righteousness in view? It’s none other than the righteousness that God requires of us, demands of us, but freely gives to us in the gospel of Christ. It begs the question, though, how is this righteousness given to us? And this is what verse 17 answers, Paul says it, from faith for faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Here Paul, to make his point, he reaches back to the minor prophet, he’d probably not be appreciative of that title, but Habakkuk chapter 2 verse 4. In that context, the prophet Habakkuk is calling God’s people to have faith in God in the face of impending exile brought on by the Babylonians. In faith, in face of such wrath and judgment that’s coming on to them, the prophet Habakkuk says, have faith, live by faith.
Paul uses these words and applies it to his own purposes in his letter to the Romans to call God’s people to a kind of posture toward the Lord, a posture of faith. So just as Israel of old would have had to live by faith back then, so too we must live by faith now. Just as the wrath of the Babylonians was almost upon them then, look what comes in the rest of chapter 1 right after this verse. The wrath of God coming on to sinners. What must we do in the face of such wrath against sin? Live by faith in Christ revealed in the gospel. And so yes, we want to say the great exchange is great and glorious.
God for our sake made Christ to be sin who knew no sin that we in Christ might become the righteousness of God, 2 Corinthians 5, 21. So the blood of Jesus washes our sin away finally and forever, but we’re not just washed white as snow and the slate cleaned. It is filled back up with the righteousness of Christ, His own righteousness. As Jesus gets our sin and bore the curse that we deserve, we get His righteousness and get the approval that He earned, not that we earned. So the gospel is the power of God for salvation because in the gospel, Christ’s righteousness is not only revealed, it’s received by faith alone. From faith for faith, the righteous shall live by faith. This is sola fide or justification by faith alone, the great doctrine that was recovered one of in the Reformation time.
As I’ve tried to do in each of these studies, I want to do here again this evening with you and conclude with a story of Luther’s. Specifically this one, Luther’s conversion story. It’s a wonderful story that we can learn a lot from that has everything to do with Romans 1, 16 and 17. Many of the answers to really pivotal and common questions about the nature of salvation are all put on display in Luther’s conversion story. So let me get into it. Luther knew the Catholic doctrines well. That the way one would be saved and come into a right standing with God is a combination through God’s grace and man’s work. This is what the Catholic church taught. This is what they still teach today. As a young monk, Luther was acutely aware of his many sins.
Try and try as he may, he never felt that he was good enough because God’s law demanded perfection and he could not meet such demands. So he would spend hours in the confessional booth and one time he spent six hours confessing sins. I mean, if you just pause right there and think, I mean, has any modern Christian even spent six hours in their life confessing sin? There’s something here we need to learn. Even though Luther is in agony and in despair, there’s something healthy about his confession. He spent six hours confessing sins, but that occasion ended in more despair because he realized as he exited the booth that there might be sins he’s committed that he’s not aware of, and so he panicked and he thought this to himself, quote, sins to be forgiven must be confessed.
To be confessed, these sins must be recognized and remembered. If these sins are not recognized and remembered, they cannot be confessed. If these sins are then not confessed, they cannot be forgiven. This caused a panic in Luther as he exited the confession booth and his mentor just happened to walk by at the right time, saw him. His name was Johann Staupitz. He noticed this and he told Luther to see God as love by looking to Christ. Luther responded with this quote, God out of mere delight hardens men and damns them to eternity. Is this who is said to be full of such mercy and goodness? This is cruel. This is intolerable. You want me to love God? I hate God. His mentor responded by just walking away. You don’t reason with Luther when he’s in such a temper.
He probably knew this, but he then did the unthinkable. He promoted Martin Luther to the position of professor in the Wittenberg University there, and Luther would begin his doctoral studies. He was tasked as he began all this with teaching through the Psalms and teaching through Paul’s letter to the Romans. This is when the great moment came. In studying Romans chapter one, he got to verse 16 and 17, and this was his conversion moment. Many people describe this. I’ll just give it to you from the authorized biography, Roland Bainton, Here I Stand. This is how he describes this moment. In Luther’s own words, I longed, I greatly longed to understand Paul’s letter to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but this one expression, the righteousness of God. In Romans 1, 17.
I took this to mean that the righteousness of God in punishing the wicked, and my situation was just that. I was an impeccable monk, but I stood before God as a sinner, troubled, having no confidence in my own works. Therefore, I did not love this just God and this angry God. I hated him and I murmured against him, yet I clung to the apostle Paul, longing to know what he meant. Night and day, I pondered until I saw the connection between the righteousness of God and the phrase, the righteous shall live by faith. Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is the righteousness by which through grace and mercy, God justifies the wicked by faith. It is then that I felt myself reborn and have gone through open doors into paradise. So for Luther, he learned and discovered for the first time in his life the place of works in the Christian life.
He knew that works didn’t save, but they show how one has been saved. He knew that works aren’t the foundation of our salvation, but they’re the necessary consequence of it. He knew that we’re not saved by good works, but he knew that we are saved unto good works. And so for Luther and for the rest of the Reformers, the faith that saves is faith alone, sola fide, but they all confessed faith is never alone. The faith that saves is faith alone, but faith is never alone, for true faith produces works. Fast forward to today.
I think we affirm this mentally, and maybe even outwardly, we sing songs about this, but internally and practically, we live as if we didn’t believe it. We live as if we’re a frog that has just fallen into a jar of milk. Follow me. That’s weird, I know. But after realizing that this frog cannot jump out of the jar, it does the only thing that it can do. It paddles and paddles and paddles and paddles until slowly but surely, the milk is churned into butter and we get out of the jar.
We say that amazing grace is one of our favorite hymns, but deep down, I think many of us just believe that if we do our best, we’ll get to heaven one day, and nothing could be farther from the truth. We need to return to repent to Scripture again to see that our works on their best day are still filthy rags before a holy God. Our works are not enough to make us right with God. We cannot do enough, so we ought to despair of our own efforts. But through despairing, we should not lose hope because of Christ. His work is always enough for us. So we have faith in Him, not ourselves. This is how we’re saved. Faith alone saves. We trust in Christ, not ourselves. So when Paul’s later writing to the Corinthians, he says, what we proclaim to you is not ourselves, but Christ. Because in Him, we have faith, and this church is our confidence. Not in our own works, but in Christ. We have faith in Christ.
May we always boast in sola fide, faith alone, because it’s through faith, the means by which the sinner grab holds of the power of the gospel, of Christ Himself, and finds salvation upon belief. This is sola fide. Can you imagine how loud this would have hit, how loud this would have been heard in a context where, late medieval age, all you did was work hard to be saved by God in the end?
And then here comes Luther and says, the one who despairs of your own works, but trusts in the work of Christ, that one is saved, though they never lift a finger. This is why Luther was, there was a bounty put on his head. It was incendiary in that context.
And maybe we’ve just heard it enough, we’ve lost the incendiary nature of this. It explodes good works, but ironically shows us what good works are all about, because the faith that saves is faith alone, but faith is never alone. It produces all manner of works that are pleasing to God.
May we grab hold of the great gospel power of God by faith. Amen. Thoughts, questions, challenges, concerns, all of the above.
