Oct. 30, 2016 A Trustworthy Word by Pastor Josh Sheldon

Well, it occurs to me that this is very much God's providence that we come to these verses on this day, the day before the 499th anniversary of Luther's Reformation -igniting theses, which we spoke of just a few moments ago.

And I didn't plan it that way, but in a very big way, it's propitious. These are the very verses,

Romans 1, 16 and 17, these are the verses that altered Luther's Catholic doctrine.

These are the ones that made him finally understand that life with God is not about his effort to be good.

Not about him trying to be righteous or making himself right before God, but it's all by faith.

These are the verses where Martin Luther understood that it's faith in what

God has done, it's a declaration of God upon all those whose faith is in the completed and righteous -inducing work of Jesus Christ on the cross.

Faith in that and faith only. By faith in him and in that cross, the guilty sinners declared righteous by God the

Father. This was the Augustinian monk's soul -freeing discovery. And God willing, as we go through this this morning, just these two verses, it will be yours too.

Here's my paraphrase of these two verses. And as I read to you my paraphrase, understand it is just that, it's a paraphrase, but I'm going to betray for you how

I've interpreted this passage. And I'm gonna betray to you also the point I'm gonna be arguing for this morning.

I think it'll come through fairly clearly. And as I read this, it will allude back to verse 15, which

Conley read to you a moment ago. I think Paul's saying something like this. The reason

I'm anxious to preach the gospel to you in Rome, of course that's verse 15. The reason I'm anxious to do that is, and now we're gonna begin at verse 16.

The gospel has never let me or anyone else down. The gospel has never let me down.

It is completely reliable, and in the end, it will vindicate all whose trust, all whose hope, all whose faith is in it.

The gospel in which I have unwavering confidence is the very power of God that reaches down from heaven and makes us able to believe and does, in fact, save us.

Now verse 17, in the gospel we have revealed the utter and unequivocal reliability of God, his fealty to his own word as the faith he has given us brings us the life he has promised us.

In a word, brethren, in a word, brothers and sisters, we can say that the gospel of God to which we were chosen by the

Father, which was completed by his Son, which was effected in us by his

Holy Spirit is reliable, is trustworthy. It is an effective action of God that actually saves sinners.

It accomplishes what God sent it for. This word that is this gospel that we proclaim in this place, this word that saves you from the judgment of God in hell forever, this word is a reliable, true, actual, real, saving word.

I think that's what Paul's getting at here. You know, there are times when we want our word to be taken and fully accepted.

We don't want any argument. We're gonna attest to it so strongly we expect no questions to come back.

It's simply what I say. Like in court, when we swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me

God. Now, I honestly don't know if that actually happens anywhere but in Hollywood, but to swear by God means to call the

Almighty as my witness. It's like the oaths that we read about in 1 and 2

Kings as we went through Elijah and Elisha's prophecy cycles, where someone would swear, may

God do so to me and more besides if I don't do this or do that, calling God as witness, and then they swear the thing that they will do, and they're saying

God is my witness, that I will, in fact, do this. In Hebrews 6 .16,

an oath, presumably in God's name, is a final word, is a grave confirmation for what's being said in our day.

People might say, I did it according to Hoyle. Hoyle, of course, in the 18th century, completed that rule book on how all card games are to be played.

And what do we mean when we say according to Hoyle? Did you do it right? I did it according to Hoyle. Means, no, we don't have to go back and forth about this.

I dotted the I's, I crossed the T's, I followed the rules. That's that kind of an oath. And more to our need this morning, more to the point we're gonna make from these two verses in Romans 1, there's the gospel truth.

We speak of a gospel truth. And most of us have heard the gospel used this way.

Are you telling me the truth? It's the gospel truth. What book did you use to find out how to fix your car?

I used Chilton's Repair Manual. It's the gospel for my kind of a car. That's, when we say that, we say that's the gospel truth, we mean, what do we mean by that?

We mean that it's utterly reliable. If you follow this repair manual, if you do what it says, you'll most likely fix your car.

It's the gospel. And by that, and in the context this morning of these two verses, this is exactly what it means.

A reliable, a true, an actual, a literal word from God that does, in fact, accomplish what

God says it's going to accomplish. Paul writes about the gospel that is the truth.

He writes about a gospel that actually is, it exists, it's reliable, and it does what

God intends. What is that? The salvation of souls.

This is what this gospel is about. Now, this morning is our third message since we started this book of Hebrews.

And I think for the first time, we need to take at least a moment and be sure we follow Paul's development of his thought.

There's different ways that we're gonna follow Paul as we go through these 16 chapters of the book. You know, there's the therefores.

Have you ever heard this expression? When you see therefore, you have to stop and ask what is therefore therefore?

That sounds a little bit, you know, Sunday schoolish, but it actually works very well. Because when

Paul says therefore, we have to stop and find out what the therefore is therefore, and Lord willing, we shall. One way of following Paul's line of thought, his reasoning, the way he develops things, is questions.

Paul will ask assumed questions, questions that are implied by what he just said. And we have to make sure we understand why he's asking the question and how he answers it and leads to the next question.

Questions are a very good way to follow Paul's line of reasoning. This morning, we have our first lesson in that.

And they're the fours, the word for. And we have three of them here.

And it will do us good to understand verses 1, 16 to 17 by looking at these fours.

We have three fours. He says, for I am not ashamed of the gospel.

Now, what's he answering there? He's answering up one verse above. Why am

I anxious to come to Rome and preach the gospel to you also who are there in the church at Rome? Because I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

Why are you not ashamed of the gospel? This is the second four. For in it, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed.

Excuse me, I got ahead of myself one. I'm not ashamed of the gospel, and why? For it is the power of God to salvation.

So I was speaking of a moment ago, that it actually does something. It's the power of God, it actually does save.

And now the third four. Why does it save? For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.

As it is written, the just shall live by faith. This is the development of his thought process here.

He wants to come to Rome because he's not ashamed of the gospel. He's not ashamed of the gospel because it's the power of God.

It's the power of God because it reveals his righteousness. We hear sometimes that in preaching, what we should do is stand here and preach law before gospel.

I've heard it actually said that what we need to do before we preach the gospel, and how God frees men from the terrors of hell, that first we need to preach the law.

I need to crush you with your sin first. Now I'm not gonna suggest even for a moment that the wheels of Christian preaching are gonna come grinding to a halt.

As everybody looks in at Providence Bible Church here in Sunnyvale to find out what Pastor Sheldon is preaching to a few dozen people.

But I wanna point out to you that what we have here in verses 116 and 17 as I posited to you a few weeks ago, is this gospel.

This is where Paul starts, is the gospel. The next verse, and Lord willing, next week we will start on verse 118.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness, and the bad news begins, and it stays from there until somewhere in chapter three, maybe verse 20.

As Paul labors to bring all men under the just condemnation of God, to show that Jew and Greek, wherever you're coming from, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Therefore you are inexcusable, oh man, begins chapter two. Soul crushing.

Judgment, justified judgment of God against the sinner.

And all that before we get to the exposition of faith that comes in the later chapters.

But before that, before that bad news, before your soul is crushed by your guilt before God, let me point out to you, and again, like I said, all

Christian preaching is not gonna grind to a halt and wait for this new paradigm. I'm not suggesting that. But before we have that, we have these two verses that are the gospel.

And I'm suggesting that before we get that bad news, and before we begin looking at that next week, that the hope of the gospel is set out first.

An article in Martyr Reformation said it this way, law must be preached in its full rigor to make people guilty before God.

I agree with that. The gospel must be preached in its full sweetness to make people righteous before God, which of course we would agree with.

If we try to do anything else with God's threatenings or promises, we are following our own agenda and not

God's. And I simply suggest, and I suggest this gently, that in the book of Romans, Paul writing under the inspiration of God, before we got the rigor, we got the gospel in these two verses that we look at this morning.

Let us look at these two verses. He says, for I am not ashamed of the gospel.

This is something called a litotes, and I probably pronounced that badly.

I think I got the accent on the wrong syllable. It's L -I -T -O -T -E -S. It's a literary device.

It's a way of amplification from negation or by understatement. When you ask someone, how are you doing?

They say, not bad. Well, they don't mean that any other possibility is available. They mean the opposite.

They mean I'm doing very well. I'm doing quite nicely, thank you. It's a way of amplifying the truth by negation.

We also do that by understatement. I think it was Martin Lloyd -Jones was speaking of how in World War II, if you would ask a

British general just before Berlin collapsed, perhaps while Adolf Hitler had the gun in his hand with which he commuted suicide, and if all those facts were known and you asked an

English general how it was going, he might say something like, well, the circumstances are not totally against us at this one point.

Well, that's the same device. It's a litotes. What he means is it's going great and we're gonna have this thing done in a few moments.

That's what Paul's doing here. He's saying I'm not ashamed of the gospel, which is, of course, to amplify quite the opposite.

Now, the shame Paul has in mind here is something we need to think about for a moment.

So I'm not ashamed of the gospel. I've read commentators who actually said, what Paul is saying is

I'm not ashamed. I'm quite proud of it. I'm very excited about the gospel. I'm seeing it expand outside.

I'm excited about this gospel that I've been preaching. But I think that a word study leads us to a little different conclusion there.

I think what Paul has in mind is the sort of shame that comes from having acted on a false assumption, for having put your hope in something that didn't pan out, that didn't work out, a misplaced confidence.

You think of people who trusted the famous swindler Bernie Madoff. I just have four names for you, fairly famous people.

Actually, three names. Steven Spielberg invested a lot of money with Bernie Madoff, lost it all. Kevin Bacon, Sandy Koufax.

You can find this very easily. A long list of very famous people who trusted this swindler,

Bernie Madoff. That's the kind of shame that Paul has in mind here, a misplaced confidence, not embarrassment.

He's not saying I'm failing to be embarrassed of the gospel. I'm willing to go out in the street corner and proclaim Jesus because I'm not ashamed of him.

That's all true. Paul was willing to go out in the street corner and proclaim Jesus, and he was not ashamed or embarrassed of Jesus.

That's all true. But I think the nuance here is a bit different. What Paul is saying is

I've not put my confidence in the wrong place.

I'm not ashamed of the gospel because the gospel, as I was saying at the beginning, is reliable, is true.

It accomplishes something. It's an actual thing that God has done.

These other people, like those who trusted a Bernie Madoff, their confidence turns out to have been poorly placed.

I think of Psalm 20, verse seven. Some trust in chariots and some in horses. Now, of course, that's going to turn out to be a misplaced trust, is it not?

They're trusting in man. That's what the chariots and the horses stand for. But he goes on, he said, but we trust in the name of the

Lord our God because trust in the Lord is a trust that is not misplaced. This is what

Conley read to you from Psalm 71. In you, O Lord, I put my trust. Let me not be put to shame.

He doesn't mean don't let me not be embarrassed, though I'm sure we don't want to be embarrassed. That's never a pleasant thing, is it?

But what he means is, vindicate me. Do not let my trust be shown to have been a falsely placed trust.

My confidence is right because it's in you. Let that be shown to be the case. Paul is saying here that the gospel of Christ, which he served with his whole heart, is reliable, is trustworthy.

Not that he's unashamedly proud. He is unashamedly proud. But here, he's more unashamedly certain.

He's preaching a gospel in which he has complete confidence. It will not let you down.

It never let him down. Go on. For it is the power of God.

Why are you not ashamed of the gospel? For it is the power of God. We're not talking about just a nice thought.

Okay, this isn't some Peter Pan think a happy thought and you're gonna be able to fly type of thing. This is the very power of God that's invested in this gospel that he sent in his son

Jesus Christ. This power of God, this word of God that is the gospel, it accomplishes what he intends.

And this is part of what Paul means about not being ashamed. Keep this in mind.

This is reality. This is truth. This is literal. The best support

I can think of for this is Isaiah 55 verses 10 and 11. He speaks of the word of God this way.

He says, for as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth.

It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and shall succeed in the thing for which

I sent it. It's an active, a powerful, a living word.

As effective now as when it was first written. Effective now because its author lives now and forever.

Because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. It's the power of God.

The power of God in a word of God that is this gospel. Let me speak to you just a moment about this power.

That I don't want you to come away thinking for just a moment that it's conceptual. That it's just an idea.

Chapter one, verse 18 of Ephesians. Paul is praying that we would have the eyes of our hearts enlightened.

That we may know what is the hope to which God has called us. What are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints?

And what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might, that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at the right hand in the heavenly places.

The prepositions there are fairly important. He worked a power in Christ when he raised him from the dead but that same power of God, this same gospel truth power of God, he works toward us who believe.

It's that power that raises dead sinners to life. For you who are dead and trespass and sin, he made alive in Christ.

This by this power of God that is the gospel. The gospel is the very power of God. We go to God in prayer.

We go confidently because his word says that he both commands prayers and he hears our prayers.

We ask for specific things that we can't actually peg to his word sometimes. We ask him to do this or that to heal, to help us, to strengthen us.

Yet we know he's answered so many times in this place, specifically filling the exact need that we brought to the throne of grace.

And from there he works his mighty and his actual and his real power on our behalf. So I think when

Paul says that he's not ashamed of the gospel, he says it's the power of God, it's reality.

It's reality. It's a true, actual power from the true living

God that he works towards those people whom he has given faith to believe. It's a powerful word.

It's a reliable word. And here's the specific thing that he intends in the gospel in this power of God.

It's the power of God for what? For salvation. It is the power of God for salvation.

It is the power of God for salvation. Now we've spoken of salvation already some.

Do we know what salvation is? Do we know what it is to be saved? Do I have to go through Romans 1, 18 through 32 and do all the bad news so we know what we're being saved from?

I love the way R .C. Sproul says that we don't get saved from hell, we get saved from God. We get saved from the wrath of God.

The very next verse we'll go to, Lord willing, next week, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness of men which they suppress in unrighteousness.

We need to be saved from God. We need to be saved from the rigors of God's anger against our willing disobedience to his law.

In a word, we need to be saved from hell. And salvation being quite the opposite of that.

We think of in Luke 16, and poor Lazarus, when he got saved, it was a time of comfort.

Of course, contrasted against the rich man who was in torment. This is what we're talking about here.

It's the difference between heaven and hell. And the only answer that will mark out that difference is faith in Christ by this gospel, by this true, actual, living word that is the very power of God to actually, in fact, save you.

To save you from God's rightful judgment and bring you into the arms of Christ.

Power of God for salvation, and for whom? What's the extent of this thing? What's the extent of this gospel that is real, that is powerful, that actually accomplishes what

God says he sent it for? To the Jew first, and also to the

Greek, and who does he mean by that? Simply everyone who believes. All who have faith to believe this message.

To the Jew first, also to the Greek, he's simply including everyone. It's to God be the glory, oh perfect redemption, the purchase of blood to every believer, the promise of God, the vilest offender who truly believes that moment from Jesus, a pardon receives.

The salvation denied no one who will come to Christ and plead with him for forgiveness of their sins by faith in what he did on the cross according to this gospel that we've just begun in this book.

It's the power of God for salvation, for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the

Greek. And we can just move in, move along, and say how does the gospel accomplish this?

If I'm preaching this to you, I'm pleading with you to believe this gospel, to be saved from the rigors of hell, and to come to Christ in faith for forgiveness of sins, and I'm telling you that this is a real word of God, it's an actual power, it's not just a conceptual thing.

How does it accomplish this? For in it, in this gospel, or by this gospel, for in it, the righteousness of God is revealed.

God's righteousness, and what is that? Here in this specific context, it simply is reliability.

It's the word of God, it's the promise of the scripture that if you will believe this gospel, it will accomplish what

God says it will accomplish. It is a reliable, a true, a trustworthy word. Reliable because God who sent us this word is reliable.

Reliable, this idea of righteousness and how that relates to reliability is something we can talk about for just a moment.

I don't wanna go into a long excursus on this, but Noah was called a righteous man.

Judah said that Tamar was more righteous than he. Psalm 34 verse 21 speaks of those who hate the righteous, which implies that there are righteous people to be hated.

And then Psalm 146 verse eight says, the Lord loves the righteous, which of course implies that there are righteous to be loved.

Just one more, Psalm 11 verse seven says, for the Lord loves, excuse me, for the

Lord is righteous. He loves righteous deeds. The upright shall behold his face.

Now what is this righteousness we're talking about here? In its most basic form, this idea of righteousness means to act in accordance with your word and in accordance with your nature and the commitments placed upon you by your time and your place.

To be true would be a very simple way to put it. But to act in accordance with your nature and with your word and the commitments that are placed upon you.

If it's that simple, and there's a lot more to it, we know that, but just for this morning, keep it that simple.

Ask ourselves, why does God love righteous deeds? Because righteous deeds reflect his nature.

They reflect who and what he is. Now of course, God's righteousness, this righteousness that is revealed in the gospel, his is of a special sort.

If we could ever be righteous, it's only by analogy. Never like God, not even close.

His is of a special kind. He is always and constantly perfectly righteous. Righteous, not just by standards of time and place, but by his nature, which is perfect holiness, unbound by any expectations of code or conduct outside of himself.

You see, God's righteousness, his only calculus that he uses to initiate his actions is his own.

Psalm 35, verse five and six. Pardon me. Your steadfast love,

O Lord, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds, your righteousness is like the mountains of God, your judgments are like the great deep.

Man and beast, you save, O Lord. Psalm 96, verse 13.

For he comes, for he comes to judge the earth, he will judge the world in righteousness and the peoples in his faithfulness.

In other words, he judges in perfect accord with his nature and his word.

Now we could go on with this subject of God's righteousness and it's going to come up again as we go through this book of Romans.

So we'll be able to come back to it. But I wanna get on with Paul's point. Righteousness here means to act in accord with your nature, with the demands that are placed upon you.

God is righteous in that he always and only and perfectly does everything in accord with his nature and his self -declared word.

And that, brothers and sisters, is what is declared in this gospel.

The gospel has to do with the forgiveness of sins. God in his righteousness does just that.

He forgives sins. Exodus chapter 34, verses six and seven.

As I read these verses, remember this is God revealing himself to Moses. Moses is in the cleft of the cliff.

He's protected, God's hand over his eyes as God passes by and Moses is able to look and hear him as his back parts go past.

And here's how God declares himself. He says, the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and fourth generation.

Now what does this have to do with righteousness? Isn't it more about his mercy? Well, it is about his mercy, that's true, but if he is righteous and he is, and if that means that he acts in accord with his own word, and of course he does, then to be righteous, he must both forgive the guilty as he says he does, and at the same time, not clear the guilty as he says he doesn't.

And this is just what is revealed in the gospel, how God can keep his word here.

And maintain his righteousness in this gospel that reveals his very righteousness.

You see, by the gospel, God forgives iniquity and transgression and sin. By the same gospel, he holds the guilty guilty, so much so that the sins of one generation are visited upon the next.

And this is the righteousness of God. I explain it this way.

You see, Jesus Christ became our guilt. 2

Corinthians 5 .21 makes this clear. Now, if you're following along in the

ESV Bible, which we've just switched to, I've got to apologize. I haven't been able to change my memory yet. I still have it in the

New King James. But Jesus became our guilt. For he, for God the

Father, he made him, God the Son, he made him who knew no sin, tempted in all ways as we are, yet without sin, he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.

You see, Jesus Christ became our guilt. God condemned him as if he became sin itself.

By faith, our punishment has been satisfied, and so God can, in righteousness, declare us to be cleared.

Do you see that? If God revealed himself to Moses and to us in Exodus, saying he keeps his steadfast love, he forgives iniquity, and yet he will not clear the guilty, how can he work that out?

How can he forgive sinners, which is what we are, and not, and still hold us guilty?

Our guilt was put on Jesus Christ, and this is the gospel. We've been talking about this being an actual gospel, an actual power of God, not just the resurrection, but the power of God that put our sin, our guilt upon Jesus Christ.

He became the guilt. God did not clear him. He was punished for us, and by faith, our punishment is satisfied in him.

This is not an uncommon theme in the Bible, by the way. This is what

Abraham had in Genesis 15, verse six. He believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.

He believed God's promises, and God reckoned that to him to be for righteousness.

How are we righteous before God? The same way, reckoned, imputed, an act of God, whereby he says,

I count this one not guilty, and how can that be? How can we who are guilty be cleared?

Because guilt was put on Jesus Christ. This is how God maintains his righteousness. This is how this gospel is a real, actual gospel, revealing the righteousness of God as he keeps his word perfectly.

This is the gospel. This is God's saving action on behalf of sinners. This is how we are declared to be righteous and therefore able to come to God, be able to stand before him.

We go on. This reveals the righteousness of God from faith for faith.

Some translations say from faith to faith. One commentator says that this is Paul's excitement about the spread of the gospel.

Another says it's about the growth of faith in the individual as we grow in faith. Still others say it's a source -destination thing with God giving faith to man, he being the source, we being the destination.

The NIV interprets rather than translates this, but I think it gets it right. It gets the idea across.

For in it, excuse me, for in the gospel, a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last.

That gets the idea across. It's all of faith. This gospel that we're talking about here, this salvation that we have in Jesus Christ, by faith.

I don't like the way the NIV says a righteousness of God. It sounds like it's sort of indefinite and I've been arguing all morning that this is a definite, a true, a real, an actual, a literal thing that we're talking about here.

So I don't like a righteousness too much as though God has other modes of righteousness he might display.

We're talking about the gospel revealing the righteousness of God. But the idea that this righteousness is revealed from start to finish by faith,

I think that's spot on. And so as we think about this imputed righteousness that this gospel provides us, circle back to Abraham for just a moment with me.

Why was he righteous? Because he believed God. He had faith.

By what cause did Abraham, the father of the faithful, by what cause did he believe?

The original language in Genesis 15, six helps us a little bit. The verb believed, it says he believed

God and that was counted to him as righteousness. That verb is in a form that we call hyphil and it's in a perfect.

You could say it this way. Abraham was caused to believe which had current effect in his life and God counted his faith as righteousness.

It was imputed to him. Faith from start to finish is from God. It is focused on God.

It is because of God that anyone can believe and it has current effect in us if you do believe.

God in the gospel of his son reveals his righteousness which we apprehend and believe and trustingly rely on by faith.

And we go on. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. That's a quote of course of Habakkuk chapter two verse four.

And with this we will wrap this up this morning. Now if you look with me at Habakkuk on page 784 and you look at Habakkuk on page 785 in your pew

Bible, remembering as I've been saying earlier how this affected so much

Martin Luther as we think about that the day before Reformation Day. Actually I should be there with you.

Paul says, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Now in the first chapter of Habakkuk, the prophet is wondering how

God can use wicked men to bring judgment against his people. And look at verse 13 of that first chapter.

I think it sums it up pretty well. You who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look on wrong, why do you idly look at traitors and are silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?

Wonder of course how God can ignore wickedness, not act immediately against it.

How he could use wicked Babylon which is the nation that's going to come and bring God's righteous judgment against his people.

We'll look down at chapter two. He says, I will take my stand at my watch post and station myself on the tower and look out to see what he will say to me and what

I will answer concerning my complaint. And the

Lord answered me, write the vision, make it plain on tablets so he may run who reads it.

For still the vision awaits its appointed time. It hastens to the end. It will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it.

It will surely come. It will not delay. And he goes on to say, behold, his soul is puffed up.

It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith. There's some question about whose soul is puffed up.

I think the best fit is the Babylonians, the very ones being sent by God to bring judgment. But what he's saying here is that the righteous ones, remember verse 113, where the ones being judged are more righteous than the ones who are bringing the judgment, if righteous they are, will live through the terror to come.

Now how so? By their faith. The righteous shall live by their faith, by total reliance on the promises of God by his word.

Those who by faith obeyed Jeremiah, for example, when they were told to surrender, when they were told this is

God's judgment, go willingly into exile and you will live, they did.

Others who didn't by faith follow God's word were less fortunate. You can read about that in the end of Jeremiah's prophecy.

It says the just shall live by faith. Shall live is in the form of continuous action. They lived through the disaster and they would live as exiles continuously by the same faith that saved them when the disaster came.

Paul's word has much the same sense to it. In fact, it's exactly the same word used in the ancient

Greek translation of the original Hebrew. Habakkuk 2, 4 and Romans 1, 17 both present to us the same thing, which is lives lived by faith in the face of impending judgment.

This is really actually a setup for next week's message. Because the just shall live by faith and if the rest of this chapter says for the wrath of God has been revealed, we see the parallel there.

The just will live through that coming wrath by the same way as the people in Habakkuk's day. By faith, by trust, by promises, by faith in the word of God.

Habakkuk says to God, Habakkuk says to take God at his word to attribute full reliability to what he says.

Paul says exactly the same thing. The gospel brings no shame because if your confidence is in it, then it's a well -placed confidence that will never let you down.

God's righteousness is that he accomplishes what he promised. Psalm 31, verse one,

Psalm 71, verse one, both say the same thing. In you, O Lord, do I take refuge.

Let me never be put to shame. In your righteousness, deliver me. Joel, chapter two, verse 27, says, you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel and that I am the

Lord your God and there is none else. And my people shall never again be put to shame.

And just a few verses later, Joel goes on to say, and it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the

Lord shall be saved. You see, the gospel's reliable because it's

God's power. It reveals his righteousness, which in this sense is his faithfulness to his own word.

People trust all sorts of things.

They're now ashamed of many of them. I mean, Bernie Madoff's victims, some of those clients who came to him, they seem happy for the whole thing to just be forgotten because the entire affair proved that they had placed their trust wrongly and foolishly in something and someone unreliable and untrue and totally unrighteous.

But not so with God. This righteousness of God that's revealed in this gospel is with his sheer, utter, unequivocal reliability.

Psalm 18, verses one through three says, "'I love you, O Lord, my strength. "'The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, "'my

God, my rock in whom I take refuge, "'my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold. "'I call upon the

Lord who is worthy to be praised "'and I am saved from my enemies.'" In other words, God accomplishes what he says he will do.

He goes on in verse 30 and says, "'This is God, his way is perfect. "'The word of the

Lord proves true. "'He is a shield for all those who take refuge in him.'" Back to Joel.

"'You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel "'and that I am the Lord your God and there is none else "'and my people shall never again be put to shame.'"

And this is the gospel. Paul says, "'For I'm not ashamed of the gospel "'because it never will let you down.

"'I'm not ashamed of the gospel "'for it is the power of God for salvation.'"

Excuse me a second. "'I'm not ashamed of the gospel for the power of God "'for salvation for everyone who believes, "'to the

Jew first and also to the Greek, "'for in it the righteousness of God "'is revealed from faith to faith as is written, "'the righteous shall live by faith.'"

My final word here, this gospel, not your own righteousness, this declared imputed righteousness, this actual real gospel that actually really will save.

A gospel is the power and righteousness by which if you have faith, your trust is in Christ, it will be proven true and you will be vindicated by it.