Without Shame

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Don Filcek; Romans 1:16-17 Without Shame

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to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series in the
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Book of Romans, A Righteousness from God. Let's listen in. Well, good morning,
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Recast Church. As Dave said, I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here, and I'm really glad to be together in this church community.
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I hope you are as well this morning. I hope that you are increasingly growing in your love for God, and your love for each other, and in your love for your community, wherever that is, that might be your neighborhood, that might be your workplace, wherever God has planted you.
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I hope that you are increasing in your love. This morning, we're gonna be looking at two of the most influential verses of the entire
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Bible, and that's hyping it up quite a bit. Of course, all of the verses of the
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Bible are inspired by God, and therefore valuable and beneficial, but these two verses, particularly, are like a manifesto of sorts for the
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Apostle Paul as he lays out his desire to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, the gospel of Jesus Christ, and even in the process of seeking to demonstrate why he hungers to present it, he actually details for us in some clarity what it actually is.
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These two verses, by the way, were the rallying point for the Protestant Reformation that swept through Europe in the 1500s.
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You had Martin Luther, and John Calvin, and Knox, and Zwingli, and some of those old guys, and Martin Luther kept coming back to these verses time and time again in sermons, in writings, and just to really fundamentally root his teachings in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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They are possibly the most theologically dense verses of all of Scripture, and those of you that are here regularly, and you call this church your home, you are gonna recognize that I'm preaching on just two verses this morning, which is not normal, but it's because there's so much in these two verses that it's worth zeroing in and really taking our time to expose the richness and the depth of these two verses.
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What we're gonna read here in just a moment seeks to clarify the answer to the question, how does the gospel work?
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What are the fundamental things that the gospel is doing and in saving us?
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And I look around the world, I'm gonna guess you see the same things that I see. I see the brokenness that Scripture explains to us through the fall of mankind in the book of Genesis.
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That makes sense to me. When I read Genesis and I read about the fall and humanity rebelling against God, I'm like, oh, that makes sense.
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When I read the news, it makes sense, and those two things go together. I also, equally, I'm not just looking out there at the world or at the headlines and seeing the brokenness out there, but then
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I look into my own heart and I see myself as prone to wander, prone to go my own way, prone to break my own rules.
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I make rules for myself and then I break them. What kind of mess is that? I'm prone to rebellion against the rule and reign of the
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Almighty God in my life. And Scripture makes sense of that. It makes sense of us through all of the
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Old Testament history and the law. How many of you ever read some of the Old Testament and you kind of scratch your head and you're like, wait a second,
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I thought this was of a grace and there's all these rules and these regulations, but all of that.
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Is Israel echoing back to us and to me? Our inability to love God by keeping
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His law. That's what it's all there for. And there's a rich depth there, but it's a huge, massive case study in human inability to honor
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God by obedience and by keeping rules. The law is not enough. And so we ought to end any study of the
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Old Testament. If you were gonna go through Genesis to Malachi and study that in depth, you ought to end that study unsatisfied.
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Unsatisfied. You don't have enough yet. You're not there yet. When you get to the closing statement of Malachi that says something to the effect of,
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I will visit them with a curse. You're like, what? What in the world? Even the very last word of the Old Testament is curse.
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So you get to the end of the story and you're wondering, how is this story gonna end? It hasn't ended yet.
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We're still waiting for something. We're waiting for a rescuer. We're waiting for a deliverer, for a savior. How will mankind be redeemed?
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You'd have these questions at the end of the Old Testament. How can a person be made righteous if the law can't do it?
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And that's where we're left at the end of the Old Testament. And so Paul here is going to answer those deep questions for us.
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How can a person be made righteous? How can a person be made right and brought back into a right relationship with God?
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And he's gonna answer those deep, historical, overarching questions in two densely packed verses here. So let's turn over, if you're not already there, it's set it on the front of the worship folder so you might have already got a clue that you needed to be over in Romans 1, 16 through 17.
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If not, turn over there, take a second. Romans 1, 16 and 17. You can turn in your journal, take out an app or open up a device or use the
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Bible that's under the seat in front of you. But I want everybody to just be able to open up God's word and follow along. They're two short verses.
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And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna read them twice just because they're short. And again, there's just a lot. There's a rich depth to the words of these two verses.
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And so follow along with me, please. Recast God's precious and powerful word to us, what he desires for us to hear this morning.
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The Apostle Paul writing, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the
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Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
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Again, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the
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Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the revelation of your word that breaks open our own hearts and reveals the crud and the mess inside.
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You don't pull any punches. You show us just how desperate our plight is, what a lack of righteousness rests and clings to each and every human heart.
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Our inability, just rolling over the annals of history, rolling over all of that history of the
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Old Testament, demonstrating through the lives of real people that we are not righteous in ourselves.
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We cannot keep your law. We cannot pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and clean ourselves enough.
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There's no soap that can wash away the stain of sin in these blood -stained hands. But Father, set our hearts free with the truth that you have provided a righteousness for us in your
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Son, Jesus Christ. And so, Father, I pray that as many of us already can steal my thunder from this morning's message that there's a righteousness available to us.
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I pray that that would explode out of us in a rejoicing this morning from our voices,
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Father, as we have an opportunity to sing before you as the redeemed people of God. And then also,
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I pray for motivation this morning. Father, I pray that somehow you would take my faulty voice and turn it into motivation in the hearts of people in real life situations this week.
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Father, that your word would implant a seed in our hearts that would ignite a fire that would light us to a passionate hunger to see others come into this righteousness too.
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And I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Well, you can go ahead and be seated. Hopefully, that was a worship experience for you.
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You were able to step before the throne of grace and worship God as he is, and just appreciate Dave and the work that the band puts in each week to helping us to see it that way.
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I encourage you to get comfortable, and I recognize that some of you, this is your first time here. At any time during the message, you can get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts while supplies last back there.
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Bathrooms are out the barn doors, down the hallway on the left -hand side. And keep your Bibles open to Romans 1, 16, and 17,
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I know it's a short passage. You could probably almost memorize this in the amount of time that we're gonna be together this morning, but having your
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Bibles open there is just a way of checking up on me, and I ask for that. I actually want that,
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I desire for you to verify that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word, and not just from my head.
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And so, that's one of the powerful things that I think is my responsibility, is to bring God's word into our context and bring what he is saying to our ears, and then ultimately, hopefully, the
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Holy Spirit translates that into your lives this week. And so, what Paul is trying to accomplish, and what we might get from these two verses, can be two very different things.
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And what I'm saying is that sometimes we have the intention behind the writing, and then we have the way that it is presented in a way that actually gives us something else.
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So in a practical sense, what I mean by that, in a practical sense, Paul is simply giving the
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Roman Christians in writing, he's writing a letter, and he's simply giving them the rationale for his dedication to the gospel.
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Why do I trust the gospel, is what he's saying. That's the purpose of it, and in this sense, these verses are very practical in a straightforward text.
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The flow of his thought process would look something like this from verses 15 through 17. In verse 15, he says,
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I'm eager to come to you in Rome and preach the gospel. And the reason is because the gospel is nothing to be ashamed about.
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It's God's saving power, and it reveals the very righteousness of God by faith.
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It truly changes lives by giving true life by faith. That's the gist of what he's trying to communicate.
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And from this standpoint, I wanna suggest that Paul likely didn't even realize that he was writing something so significant or so profound.
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Really, ultimately, I don't think he knew that these two verses, this portion of a letter that he was gonna write, was gonna change the entire course of history.
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And I think it's that way in our lives, isn't it? We don't know the inconsequential, small decisions that we make that result in big picture life changes.
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Or do you, I mean, think back to your last week. Do you know the most important thing you did this past week? Do you really have a perspective on that?
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You don't, but maybe 10 years from now, you might. I mean, there might be something that you did this past week that has substantial consequences in your life or in the life of your children or in the life of your family or something, but we don't really know how that works.
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But at the end of the day, he is here just writing about his trust in the gospel.
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And what he wrote was so fundamental, I think, to his understanding and so basic that I don't think it necessarily stood out to him, but it almost serves as a side note in his thinking to the flow of Romans explaining just why
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I trust the gospel so much. But from this text, the very bedrock of our faith can be very clearly stated and discerned.
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You see, Paul begins with a negative statement turned positive, and I think even some translations, you might have a translation on your lap right now or in front of you that states this in the positive and leaves it at that, and that doesn't quite do justice to what the
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Greek text is telling us, because when you say, I am not ashamed, you could equally say, I'm proud of, right?
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Do you know what I'm saying? You could say, I'm proud of the gospel or I'm glad for the gospel or I'm happy in the gospel, but instead he says,
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I am not ashamed of the gospel. The way that he says it, the way he words this, even in the
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Greek language, makes it clear that he's acknowledging that there are either some who are ashamed of the gospel, maybe
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Paul had run into people who were ashamed or he had come up against that to such a degree that he feels the need to negate that statement, that idea.
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And so he says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel, or at least that thought, think about this, maybe that thought about being ashamed of the gospel has actually crossed his mind before.
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And I'm gonna get back to this idea of shame about the gospel later, really at the end of the message, we're gonna talk about a few things kind of as points of application of understanding in terms of that shame, but at least at this point, here at the start of this message, let the thought lodge in the back of your mind that timidity and shame surrounding evangelism has been around since the very beginning.
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That feeling, in other words, that feeling that overcomes you when your palms get sweaty and it's like, do
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I really have to go here? Do I really have to do this? When the opportunity presents itself in your workplace or among coworkers, in your neighborhood, among, you know, with one of your neighbors just talking over the fence or, and there's a conversation, there's a hook in that conversation, you recognize this hook is meant for the gospel to hang on at right now.
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Have any of you ever been in a conversation where that's the nature of it? And I like to think of it that way. A lot of times you should just be, just keep your eyes open for the hooks and they'll present themselves.
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There are hooks all the time that's like, that's a gospel -shaped hook, that's meant for the gospel.
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When somebody's talking to you about, when they finally bare their soul, when everything turns from small talk and how
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Michigan basketball is really rocking right now. When the conversation turns from the weather to the hard issues and somebody literally opens up and says, hey, you go to church, don't you?
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I mean, what does God say about divorce? What does God say about this issue that I'm dealing with with my kids right now? Or this struggle that I'm having with my parents?
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What's that all about? Or just trying to figure out where I'm gonna go to college and I really don't even know what the future holds for me or what
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I wanna study or whatever. And the heart turns outside and is grasping for something and you're there with an opportunity.
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And that feeling that comes. How many of you have felt that feeling before? That feeling of fear. Do you know what
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I'm talking about? There's a genuine fear that can overcome us. And what Paul was saying here is that fear, that feeling has an ancient tradition.
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It goes back to the beginning. I am not ashamed, which implies that there's some sense of feeling of potential shame involved in this.
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But the reason that Paul is unashamed about the gospel is gonna take up the next two verses and even clarifies the value of the good news.
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What is the real force behind the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news? In verse 16, he expounds on the first reason he's unashamed.
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He says, it's because it, that is the gospel, is the power of God for salvation. It is the power of God for salvation.
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And I wanna kinda break this down by giving some emphasis to each word in that sentence for just a second. Bear with me, but think about it this way.
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It is the power of God for salvation. What is the it? Well, the it is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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Fundamentally, we need to define what the gospel is, and we complicate it, we make it very confusing. We can add all kinds of things in and out.
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And boy, I'm no student of the Bible, and so I don't know if I'm qualified to share the gospel because I'm not quite sure 100 % what it is.
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It is that Jesus Christ came, lived a sinless life, died, and rose again.
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Can you share that good news with someone? And he did it for us. Of course, the for us needs to be in there. For our sins, to cover us, to cleanse us, to purify us, to put us back in a right relationship with God.
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But Jesus came, lived a sinless life, died, and rose again on our behalf.
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That's the gospel. And it is the power of God for salvation. Secondly, it is the power of God for salvation.
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Not it brings the power of God for salvation. Not it shows the power of God for salvation.
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Not it demonstrates the power of God for salvation. It is the power of God for salvation.
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Do you hear that? It is. It is the power of God for salvation.
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There is no other way. There aren't other powers available to save you. It is the power of God.
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But it is exclusive. It is the power of God for salvation. It's an amazing expression of His might.
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The gospel could be declared to be a wonder, a miracle of sorts. It is the power of God for salvation.
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Yahweh, the Eternal One, all the way back in the Old Testament, the Creator God, the all -powerful
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Creator God. He is the one expressing His power in this gospel.
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Not man's power, not the church's power, not the pastor's power, but God's power.
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And it is the power for what, church? The power for salvation. This is a power worked by God with the results of saving people.
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It's unto salvation. The thing is, the thing that He's talking about is the powerful gospel. The result is salvation to everyone who believes it.
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And you might ask, saved from what? Well, in an ultimate sense, the salvation that we receive through the good news of Jesus Christ is a salvation from the final judgment that all will face at the end of days, a reckoning of life before the
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Almighty God, the just judge of all. So Paul is giving us here a fundamental reason he was not ashamed of the good news of Jesus Christ, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes in.
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At the foundation is the reality that the gospel starts with God. He begins with explaining the relationship of God to the gospel.
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The gospel is nothing less than God's power expressed for salvation. It doesn't bring, as I mentioned before, it's not that it just merely brings the power of God.
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It doesn't merely demonstrate or show us the power of God, nor does it merely give access to the power of God.
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The gospel is, is, is the power of God for salvation. And the message is the power.
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You see, news is usually about something else. This is good news that is the main point.
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In this case, the good news, it is the good news that has the power to transform a destiny.
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It has the power to transform a person from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.
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Real power of the almighty God is found in the proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ.
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There is power, there are power in these words that Jesus came to die for you and was raised again on the third day.
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Do you trust that to be true, church? Recast, do you believe that in the declaration of the gospel is power and not just some chintzy power like dynamite or the power to create galaxies, but the very power of the almighty
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God rests within these words. Last week, Bill Smith preached in my absence.
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I'm really grateful for him being willing to step in from time to time for me. And actually, he's my emergency call if I have appendicitis on a
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Saturday night, he's the one who's going to preach. And I'm just grateful to have somebody like that. But last week he was preaching, great message.
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If you didn't get a chance, you weren't here last week, go back and listen to that. That impacted me this week as I had a chance to go back and listen to his message on the name of God, wonderful counselor.
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And last week he was explaining to us the word for wonderful comes from the same word for wonder or for miracle in the
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Old Testament. And he was encouraging us to contemplate and consider the various wonders of God, the things that he did.
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And I mean, you can just think of some of those amazing miracles that you read about in the scripture. Consider the miraculous power expressed in the parting of the
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Red Sea, a salvation for his Old Testament people. Or the amazing power of God expressed in bringing man in the wilderness, a powerful manifestation of his provision for his people.
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And so ask yourself, where does the gospel rank in the list of the wonders, the miracles of God?
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Do you consider his power expressed in the incarnation? Do you consider his power expressed in the sinless life of Jesus, born a man just like us, but without sin?
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Do you consider his power in the sacrifice on the cross to shield us from his righteous wrath?
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Or how about the empty tomb? But maybe I think the greatest expression of his power, and what
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I think Paul has in mind here as he's talking about the power of God for salvation, is the way that God takes us from the status of rebellious enemies of God to righteous sons and daughters before him.
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The power expressed in our status change from enemy to son and daughter, to heir with him.
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And Paul concludes verse 16 by calling his audience toward humility. The gospel was first brought, again, no wasted words in this text.
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The gospel was brought first to the Jew and then secondly to the Gentile. And that might not make a whole lot of sense to most of us, it's not a super main point, but historically that is true.
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And it's also theologically true that the gospel came to the Jews first, and it was intentional on God's part.
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So I want to just point out that you've got to be careful about your words when you're talking about God. You don't speak about God having a plan
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B. Plan A failed, the Jews let me down, so now I'm going to go to plan B. It was always
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God's plan to bring about the cross and Christ, slain from the foundation of the world. But to say that God gave the
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Jews a first shot at receiving their Messiah would be consistent and it's very clear in the life and ministry of Jesus.
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He was, I mean, just think about the facts about the way that he came into the world. He was born of Jewish descent, he spent his life among the
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Jews. Not traveling around to Rome, not traveling around to the rest of the known world, but he spent his time here on earth among the
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Jews. And he was eventually rejected, of course, we know, by the Jews in a quite formal and clear way.
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I don't know about you, but if somebody crucifies me, I'm pretty sure they don't like me, right? That's a pretty formal rejection.
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And he was formally rejected by his people. But you see, he came to present the
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Messiah to the people of God to give them the first shake and Paul will expound on that theme later in the book of Romans.
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It's going to come up again and in that sense, verses 16 and 17 serve as a little bit of an outline for the book to an understanding of the themes, at least, that he's going to be covering.
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But it seems likely that the church in Rome needed some sense of correction here, that probably being a primarily
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Gentile, that is non -Jewish church, that some arrogance had arisen among them.
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The idea that the Jews didn't even accept their Messiah, so we will. Like they missed the boat.
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They didn't quite get it. And so Paul is going to attempt to try to correct any arrogance that he sees in any kind of racism or any kind of ethnic, my people are better than your people kind of perspective.
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So in saying, no, no, no, you guys, you Gentiles, get this right. It came to the Jews first. That's the way that it went.
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So that's what he's getting at here at the end of verse 16. So all of verse 16 really at the end is Paul seeking to motivate us by an appeal to the power of God expressed in the gospel.
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It's the power of God. Why would we be ashamed of that? Why would we be ashamed of bringing the very powerful way that God has provided for people to be saved into our context, into our workplace, into our schools, into our neighborhoods, into our family?
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But in verse 17, he's going to go on, he's going to give us a second reason that he has no shame in the gospel. The second is that in this good news, we see the righteousness of God revealed to us.
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The very righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel. Now I read pages and pages on this one phrase, and there are a lot of pages written on the one phrase, the righteousness of God.
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Does that mean that he possesses righteousness and we get to see the righteousness that he possesses in the gospel? Well, yes, that's a component of it, but there's also a perspective in which he's giving us a righteousness that comes from God.
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It could equally be translated, the righteousness of God, that which he possesses, but also a righteousness from God, that which he gives, is sharing with us.
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That phrase, what we need to remember in the phrase righteousness of God is that the gospel reveals this as a reason that Paul wasn't ashamed to share the gospel indiscriminately with everyone.
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And after extensive study, I believe that Paul had that double -edged concept in this phrase.
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The gospel of Jesus Christ reveals both the righteousness of God as he expressed his faithful kindness towards humanity and grace, but his righteousness is also a gift to those who trust him by faith.
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So Paul writes in many other places about the interplay of righteousness and faith. What can be kind of confusing, and again, theologically technical in this text.
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So let me take us over to another passage that will help to clarify this, because Paul writes about the relationship between righteousness and faith often throughout his writings, but maybe the most clear is in Philippians 3, 8, and 9.
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I'm really gonna focus on 9, but I wanted to give you verse 8 just to give a little bit of the context here, and that'll be on the screen.
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You can jot that reference down. It'd be a great passage to memorize, a great passage to meditate over and to think about this week.
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But it states this, again, potentially the most clear interplay between righteousness and faith and the way that faith brings to us or what it gives to us.
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He says, Paul writing in Philippians, Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing
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Christ Jesus my Savior. For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things. And boy, did Paul suffer.
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He was beaten. He lost a lot of things. But he says, I've suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, refuse, garbage, in order that I may gain
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Christ and be found in him. Listen, church, here it is. Don't let me lose you here. Not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law.
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Not a righteousness that I drummed up on my own. Not my ability, not my obedience, not my ability to follow the
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Ten Commandments, none of that. But that righteousness which comes through faith in Christ, a righteousness by faith, a justification, a being made right with God by faith.
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And then he goes on. Here it is. The righteousness from God that depends on faith.
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How does a person get righteousness? By obeying, by attending church, by giving to the poor, by serving at the food pantry, by raising godly kids.
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How is a person made righteous? What does the verse say? By trusting the gospel.
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Justified, made right in God's eyes by faith and faith alone.
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And just as Paul indicates that there is a righteousness from God that comes by faith in Philippians, he is here in Romans saying that he cannot be ashamed of a message that really is the only hope that anyone has for righteousness before God.
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This is the only way that a person will stand on that final judgment day righteous and okay with God.
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How many of you want to be okay with God on that day? Raise your hand. Raise your hand high if you want to be okay with God on that day.
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I think that's all of us. We want to be okay with him. We don't want to be his enemy standing there when he comes to us for judgment.
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And this is the way that he's provided. Paul is explaining the only basis upon which a person can truly be made right with God.
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Why would we be ashamed of that church? That way is faith in the good news that Jesus came for us, died for us, and was raised again for us.
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Paul will go to great lengths to explain in more detail that our only hope as a fallen and busted broken person is a righteousness that comes from God by faith and trust in him.
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That's going to be a theme throughout the book of Romans and again even the series title here is taken from that, a righteousness from God.
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And this righteousness is made known to us through faith and for faith. A really confusing phrase, not a construction that we would use very often.
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It is by faith or through faith and for faith. It is not, in other words, a righteousness revealed to us from works.
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It is not a righteousness that comes to us from keeping the law, not a righteousness from church attendance, not a righteousness from volunteer service and giving to the poor, not a righteousness from activism and standing on the right side of history, not a righteousness from electing the right leaders, not a righteousness from avoiding bad movies, but by faith.
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Not even a salvation or a righteousness that comes from guarding our own hearts, but a righteousness that comes to us only by faith.
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Only by faith. Paul is talking about a righteousness, do you get it? A righteousness, a right standing with God that can only come to us by trust.
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You see, believing the gospel is so powerful because the thing that we're believing in the gospel is that God has granted his righteousness to our account.
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Here at the end of the verse, in a very packed in and almost poetic way, Paul explains that the one who receives
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God's righteousness by faith will go on to a different kind of life, by faith or through faith and for faith.
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It is often called eternal life, the type of life that he's gonna give us in that extra for faith.
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It's not an end in itself, but it is often called eternal life, abundant life, or a life of faith that he grants to those who come to him based on trust that the gospel is true.
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His phrase from faith and for faith is a way of saying faith is the way we get the righteousness of God applied to our lives.
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But that faith is not an end in itself, that starting faith, that first faith is not all there is. You see, because faith leads to more faith.
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It's a cycle in the life of a believer that begins with faith for the purpose of a life lived day by day in more faith.
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And he ends by quoting Habakkuk 2 .4. Not many people probably read Habakkuk or Habakkuk or however you pronounce it.
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Habakkuk 2 .4, the righteous shall live by faith, and he does that to clarify for us that he's getting down now away from salvation and towards sanctification, towards the life lived out by faith in God.
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If this is at all confusing or too technical, forgive me, but let me slice down to the bottom line here. You become righteous by faith in this most powerful message of Jesus Christ.
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And that same message fuels the advancement of faith in the life of a true believer. It is the gospel that we start with, the gospel we live with, the gospel we end with.
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It is everything through and through of what the Christian life is made out of.
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We are saved by faith and we live by faith. At Recast, what do we want to be growing in?
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Growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service. We want our faith to be stronger, our faith to be more rooted in Scripture this year than it was last year and next year more than it is this year, right?
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And the main reason I believe that Paul is even talking about this here is the propensity of each and every one of us to a person in this room to think that we might be saved by grace and then we go on and proceed to live based on works.
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See, I'm convinced that we're so quick to slide back into the false notion that we're acceptable to God based on our performance.
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How many of you would just be honest and raise your hand and say, that's me from time to time? Sometimes I think God is angry at me yesterday because I didn't do the right things.
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Today he loves me more because I woke up and I prayed. And tomorrow he'll love me more because I might add a little
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Bible reading in there too. And then I'll have devotions with the kids before we go to bed and then he'll love me a lot.
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And then I'll serve at the food pantry and wow, that's going to be amazing. And then I'll go on a missions trip and then he'll really, really like me.
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Is that the way that it is? Not according to this. This turns that on its head.
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It is by faith for faith. It's all faith from beginning to end, end in the middle, all the way through and through by faith.
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I believe we often get this wrong in our own personal lives and it couldn't be further from the truth, the notion that God's love for us is based on our performance.
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No, that's fallen humans that do that to you. That's the way we treat one another in our brokenness.
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That's the stain that Satan wants to pass off from your brokenness off onto God and say, well,
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God is just like you. He's not faithful. He looks at you according to what you can give him.
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That's what Satan wants you to believe. That's not true at all. His love is not like our love.
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His ways are higher than our ways, recast. Satan would love you to bind to the lie that is based on your performance and so you better just get busy just doing and doing and doing.
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You see, many Christians fall into that, but I would suggest to you that it's even more dangerous when a church falls into that and a church falls into it by the people in the church falling into that false notion.
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And hear me carefully, recast. I think this is a very, this is very important. Arrogance rides the coattails of a works -based life.
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If you think that your life and your performance is what's driving your Christian life, then it's just a matter of time until competition and arrogance slide into your life in a way that you didn't see it coming.
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And the way that you look at others, you see, I mean, where works are seen as the basis for righteousness, there is really in the end only competition.
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You see, if it is indeed about performance, all I need to worry about is you, that I need to be better than you.
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I look out at you and I say, as long as I'm living better than the majority of the people in this room, I must be okay, right?
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If it's about performance, I just, you know, hope that God grades on a curve or something, but at the end of the day, it's like, it's about competition.
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I'm looking at you going, am I at least as righteous as them? I'm not as bad as that person, I'm not as bad as that person,
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I guess I must be okay with God. And that's a dangerous place because comparisons and petty squabbles and power plays for authority will rule wherever a works -based, performance -based salvation is found, where you think that God is looking at you primarily only through the lens of your performance.
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By the way, you're not doing that good to begin with. The best person in this room, the most righteous person in this room on their own is damnable, according to Scripture.
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Did you know that? You're not doing that good to begin with, so don't give yourself the credit. At the end of the day, we're all condemned without the righteousness of Christ to cover us.
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But you see, that painted picture of where performance is, where we grasp this gospel church, if we really get this, if we really grab a hold of this truth, that it is a righteousness that comes to us by faith and trust in Christ, lived out in a humble way.
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I believe that a humble kingdom life is found wherever the king is granted his rightful place as the author, hear me, the author, that's the starter, and the perfecter of our faith, where we trust that, where we believe it is him and him alone.
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Who gets the credit for the good that you do? Well, it's only to you, Christ. It's only to you who have given me muscles, who are letting me consume your oxygen, who are letting me consume your calories here on this planet, who are giving, you're constantly giving me breath, you're giving me everything that I have.
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But how can I not reflect back to him the glory and the honor for everything, everything unto you,
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Christ? So in the gospel, God has exercised his great power to give salvation to everyone who believes, and that results in eternal life, beginning with faith and continuing on in faith.
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By the way, the phrase eternal life, I use that a couple of times, I don't want to clarify. Many Christians have the false notion that eternal life begins when
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I die. Eternal life began when you accepted this truth of the gospel by faith. It's kind of a qualitative type of life that will go on forever and ever and ever.
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Death will be like a stop along the way. It'll just be a station, stay on the train, it's gonna continue on.
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Do you get that? Eternal life is a beautiful thing that is the actual possession, not a future possession for you, it is an actual possession for anyone who belongs to Christ.
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It's possible that I may have confused some of you all with this explanation, and I believe that God could be in that as well, if you're here and you're confused and some of these things are new to you, if it's confusing to you,
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I would love to get together with you and talk about these things, these are fundamental things, and as I said, they are the most fundamental truths of the
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Christian life. Eternal life hangs in the balance of understanding these things.
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Without believing this gospel, the power of God and the righteousness of God will be absent from your life, and all of us will stand in judgment before God, and our only hope is that the righteousness of Christ covers us, and the only way to have the righteousness of Christ cover us is by trust in the gospel.
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But now let me conclude by addressing any potential shame for those of us who are in Christ, you're firm there, you know you have the righteousness of God, then let me talk to you about the potential shame regarding the sharing of the gospel and evangelism out in our community and in your place of work and all throughout our community.
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Throughout this text, what Paul is saying is he's not ashamed of the gospel, and there's laced in here some of the reasons that the gospel could be a source of shame.
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I think it's intentional, it's on purpose that he does this, but there are six things that I've identified that he says here that could be stumbling blocks for some of us in sharing our faith that at the end really are the glory, they demonstrate in what a radical message we have to bring.
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How many of you know that part of our feeling of fear and shame is because this gospel runs against our culture, did you know that, did you already know that?
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It rubs people the wrong way, doesn't it? Like the first thing that he points out clearly in this text about the gospel, the gospel shows us
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God's power, great, but the downside of that is that it demonstrates our weakness.
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God had to express his immense power to save someone like me. I don't save myself,
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I don't have anything of myself, and embedded in the gospel is the fact that we couldn't save ourselves. We live in a culture of pride and arrogance and independence and I can do attitude and the fact of the matter is, the message we have to bring to people is our powerlessness, we can't do it.
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We bring a message of weakness without any ability to remedy our own situation. So I would suggest to you that some have derided
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Christians as weaklings in need of a crutch. Any of you ever heard that God is just a crutch for you? Some of you have heard that?
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And I would agree. Somebody comes to me and says, oh, that whole God thing, that's just a crutch for you, I'd say, yeah, it is a crutch for me, but it's a really powerful crutch.
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You should see what this crutch can do. This is a crutch like no other crutch you've ever seen in your life.
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It is the most amazing, the best, the best of all, the most awesome, amazing of all crutches.
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Second thing that the gospel brings to us is, that he says about the gospel, rather, is that it's available to everyone.
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Well, that sounds great at first blush until you realize how scandalous it is. It's available to everyone.
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Do you see that in verse 16? To everyone who believes. Anyone can believe. It's available to everyone.
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Not to everyone who cleans up their act, not to everyone who looks like me, not to everyone who thinks just like me, not to everyone who comes from my tribe, but to everyone.
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And also what can be somewhat offensive in this is the reality that it is indeed the message for everyone.
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It's the only thing that we have to share, and that means we have to share it with Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and animists and atheists and Wiccans and everyone.
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This good news is the hope for any and all, the only hope that humanity has for a righteous standing before God.
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And if we believe that, if we believe that this is the only hope, then why would this be a hurdle?
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The powerful good news is available to all. The third thing is it is to the
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Jew first and also then to the Greek, and that just puts us in a position where the majority of us, the majority of the people you're going to share with us, they're coming in second already.
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It's a humbling truth that Paul throws in there for our contemplation. The good news was first to the
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Jew, and since very few of us are Jews, it puts all of us, the majority of us in this room, are in second place.
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I'd rather be in second when it comes to the favor and grace of God than completely left out of the race altogether.
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You buy me a ticket and let me go with you to see the Tigers play at Comerica for free, and I won't complain a bit about getting the nosebleed out in left field.
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Not at all. I'll be just glad to be there at the park. Do you know what I'm saying? And so, you know, what is your attitude and thought about humility when it comes to the way that you came into the gospel?
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Number four, the gospel highlights God's justice and our need for an imputed righteousness.
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In other words, we cannot fix ourselves. Very similar to number one, it can be highly offensive to good people to tell them that they are not good enough.
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Any of you ever experienced that? Some of the hardest people to share the gospel with are religious people.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? People who think that they've got it all together and they've got it all figured out. But this is the core of the gospel.
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We need a righteousness from God to save us, not a righteousness that we can muster on our own.
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And I'm convinced that there are many people who are looking for relief from trying to please God in religion, and we look at them on the outside and we say, well,
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I won't share the gospel with that person. They've got their life together. They actually live a little bit better than I do. I mean, they help out, they give to the poor, they're really involved in United Way.
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They volunteer in their kids' classroom in school, and they're just giving, giving, giving to the community.
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And we are not doing them any favor by keeping our mouths quiet and acting like their righteousness counts for anything.
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The fifth thing, the gospel Paul is presenting reveals our empty hands.
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It exposes the emptiness of our hands. From faith for faith. The very fact that salvation is through faith shows that we had nothing to bring to the equation.
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And before you think, well, at least I had my faith, at least I brought that. I would encourage you then to redefine faith.
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Go read it in scripture, study it to know what is a biblical faith. Faith is an empty -handed approach to the
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Almighty. It is the very nature by which we humble ourselves and say, I've got nothing to bring that is faith.
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Saving faith is the empty -handed approach to God. You see, many of us might have the false notions that come, kind of bleed over from Catholicism into our theology and our thinking about salvation as if faith is a substance.
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It has some kind of substance to it that we can bring to God and we bring him a handful of faith and he says, okay,
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I see that faith, I'll take that, here's your salvation, here's your righteousness. But faith is not a substance.
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It is an empty -handed approach to God. It is saying, I've got nothing here.
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I am dependent on you. And God smiles. He delights in anyone, no matter what your past is, no matter what you've done, if you will humble yourself under the
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God who created you and let him put your life back together, he will smile and delight over you.
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He will dance over you with joy and heaven will rejoice if you would humble yourself and say, I've got nothing to bring.
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I've got empty hands, but God, would you fill them? Would you fill them with your righteousness from your son?
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Lastly, what's demonstrated here in the passage is that this gospel results in a humble, dependent life.
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It says the righteous will live by faith, as verse 17 concludes, and the message we have to bring is not one that results in the types of things that often are sold when we present the gospel.
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Often you'll hear televangelists tell you, you know, just come to Jesus, give money, do this, that, and you'll get wealth and health and prosperity and fame and worldly status or power or authority.
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That's not what he's saying here. He's saying the righteous will live a humble life of faith.
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See, we are saved to a life of humble dependence upon God, and that should be our message to the world around us.
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When we come to saving faith, we forsake the worldly ways of self -centered living. And when we call others to this gospel, we're calling them to join us in taking up our crosses and following Jesus.
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We're calling others to live a new type of life, the kind that looks like living by faith and not by sight.
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And I don't know about you, but increasingly in this world, a life by faith and not by sight looks foolish and weird to the world out there.
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It's looking more and more strange every day. Finding the distance in my ability to communicate the truth to the people at the coffee shop more and more confusing, even in my mind, like how in the world did they get that out of this?
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And we're just not on the same page. It used to be that you could give an illustration, and I'm going to get on a soapbox, none of this is in my notes.
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It used to be that you could talk about David and Goliath with somebody, you could talk about Jonah and the whale, you could talk about biblical stories, and people would have the same framework.
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They'd get the gist of what you were talking about. No more. We're becoming an increasingly biblically illiterate culture and society, aren't we?
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Outside the church? Let's not let that be true in here, recast.
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Let's not be biblically illiterate in here. I mean, at least have it right in here so that we can carry that out to the world around us.
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A foolish type of living is what we're calling people to, but this is our gospel. This is the good news.
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So, as we come to communion this morning, let's consider this powerful gospel that has brought righteousness from God to us.
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We take a cracker and some juice each week to remember the central message of our faith. Jesus, God's own
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Son, willingly came to us, and He died in our place. And in the great exchange,
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He became our sin to die on the cross to put our sin to death there, so that we could receive
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His righteousness. That's mind -blowing, church. I hope that's mind -blowing to you.
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We've not only been forgiven by faith in Christ, but we've been granted His righteousness instead.
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In other words, just a financial illustration, He didn't merely take our debt away, but He deposited an eternal righteousness in our savings account.
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He didn't just bring the balance from a negative balance up to zero and say, go for it. Now the rest is up to you.
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He gave us an eternal righteousness in our account. So let this glory, let that power, let this granted righteousness move you this week to be unashamed, unashamed, unashamed of the good news of Jesus Christ.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank You so much for salvation in Christ. I thank
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You for the good news and for Your just amazing wisdom bringing forth salvation for those of us who are hopeless.
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Father, I don't think if we could really see the bigger picture of Your righteousness and Your holiness, just how far gone our lives were without Christ.
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And so Father, I pray that You would move in each one of us as we have an opportunity to come to these tables, that anyone who belongs to You would feel free to step to these tables and take that cracker to remember
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Your body broken for us and to take that juice to remember the blood of Jesus shed for us.
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But Father, if there's anybody here who needs to sit back and not go back there because they don't understand these things yet, they haven't figured it out,
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I pray that You would help them to remain in their seats, but then with boldness to come and either email me, text me, come into the office, or even just catch me at the door on the way out and say,
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I want to talk about these things. I need a righteousness from Jesus. And Father, I pray that You would, just even through this series in Romans, be sparking and igniting our hearts, each and every one of us, to go out and share this amazing, glorious righteousness that is available to a world dying without You.