WWUTT 1151 Introduction to Romans?

There is not a book of the Bible that we would call systematic theology. But if there's any book that comes the closest, it would be the book of Romans, laying out the doctrine of justification by faith when we understand the text.

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Beginning a New Study in Romans

Now here's our host, Pastor Gabe Hughes.

Thank you, Becky. Well, today we begin a brand new sermon series in the book of Romans. And I'm going to start out today by reading Romans chapter 1, verses 1 through 17. Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures concerning his son, who was descended from David, according to the flesh, and was declared to be the son of God in power, according to the spirit of holiness, by his resurrection from the dead.

Jesus Christ, our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.

To all those who are in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. First of all, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is proclaimed in all the world.

For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I mention you always in my prayers, asking that somehow by God's will I may now at last succeed in coming to you.

For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you, that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith, both yours and mine. I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that I have often intended to come to you, but thus far have been prevented, in order that I may reap some harvest among you as well as among the rest of the Gentiles.

I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Now if you've been a long-time listener of When We Understand the Text, you might be thinking, why are we coming back to the book of Romans?

Didn't Gabe do this before? And yes, you would be correct. I have taught out of Romans on this broadcast before. But if you are that long-time listener, then you will also know that teaching was a little bit abbreviated, at least at the very beginning.

I was still kind of juggling some things. I was trying to find my groove in doing this podcast, which I hadn't come into yet. I was trying to couple the teaching of Romans on the broadcast with Romans, which I was doing in my church at the time.

I was still preaching through Romans. I thought that if I were doing both at the same time, maybe it would help me out a little bit. With all the stuff that I had going on and how busy I became, it was also difficult to juggle doing the podcast with other responsibilities, namely my ministry to my own family.

Some of my time that I should have been spending with my wife and my kids was being lost. One of those things that I felt like I had to cut out was the podcast. I almost cut it out entirely. But I thought maybe I could just decide to do a five-minute thing.

After all, when we understand the text, it kind of started with 90-second videos, these short, quick addressing of various biblical topics. So maybe I could do the broadcast in that same sort of a tone, that same sort of flavor.

So I started doing five-minute broadcasts, and that began with the study of Romans. So the first several lessons in Romans were all just like four and a half minutes long or something like that. Well, we got quite a few emails from folks who were saying, no, come on.

We loved the 20-minute lessons. That was what I did my devotionals to every day. Or somebody would say, I listened to 10 minutes on my way to work, and then I listened to the other 10 minutes on the way home from work.

It was like the perfect length for me. So since we had such an influx of emails asking to come back to the 20-minute devotional lessons, I compromised and I went to 10 minutes. So for the first little while, Romans was four-and-a-half-minute devotions.

Then it became 10-minute devotions, and then I was able to come back into doing 20 minutes. I just kind of had this mindset coming out of radio that everything that I recorded had to fit a certain time constraint.

So all of the podcasts were like exactly 28 minutes long at the very beginning or something like that. That was really hard to sustain. That was actually very difficult. But once I figured out I could just do 20 minutes and make it about the length of what Albert Moeller was doing on the briefing, once I started doing that, it became easier to do the broadcast, especially when I wasn't trying to fit a certain time constraint.

After all, no radio stations were airing this at the time, and I wasn't having to fit it all into certain time blocks in order to make it work. I could just record a podcast. If you wanted to listen to 20-something minutes of me talking, that was up to you.

I didn't have to fit a certain time constraint to go along with all the other programming that was going on. I could make this however long I wanted to make it. So I had to come out of that radio mindset of thinking it all had to be exactly a certain length.

And once I was able to do that, then doing the podcast came a lot more naturally. It was easier to do, and I wasn't having to spend as much time doing editing and splicing things together and stuff like that.

So then I was able to go back to the 20-something minute broadcast, which is where we are now. But when we started in Romans the first time, that's not the kind of devotionals that I was doing. So this is almost like coming back to Romans, redoing this one again since I had not given it the same sort of attention that I give to other books that we've taught through so far on the broadcast.

So that's one of the reasons why I'm coming back to Romans. Another reason is it's great. It's such a great book. Why would we not come back to the Book of Romans? You know, sometimes the way things are laid out in Scripture, you can kind of scratch your head on, why did they put this book of the Bible here?

Why not put it there? Sometimes the way canon is arranged is a little puzzling. But Romans succeeding Acts, that's like the perfect partnership. Where we concluded in the Book of Acts, the Apostle Paul was under house arrest in Rome.

He's preaching the gospel there. So we go from there to the Book of Romans. It's just like the perfect flow. Now, of course, this letter was written before Paul got to Rome. And you could hear that in what we read right here.

Paul saying to them, I long to come to you and I haven't been able to come to you yet. Where we finished the Book of Acts, Paul succeeded in being able to get to Rome and preach the gospel there. But at this particular time, this was still a few years out, Paul being able to make it to the capital city of the world, an opportunity to preach the gospel to the church that was there in Rome.

So he's written this letter to them. Now, what is the purpose of this letter? What is the main reason for writing it? And that's kind of what we want to go over in this preliminary lesson today, kind of an overview of the Book of Romans.

The main theme of this book, what Paul is ultimately writing to get across to the Christians of the church there in Rome, be they Jew or Gentile. He wants them to understand justification by faith. We are saved by faith in Christ alone, not of our works by faith in Christ.

That is the main message of the Book of Romans. And this is an absolutely brilliant book. I can't remember who this was that I heard say this. I want to say it was R .C. Sproul. But the genius that is demonstrated in the writing of this book really shows just how smart a guy Paul was.

We know that Paul was very educated. He knew the ways of the Pharisees inside and out probably better than any Pharisee did. He was a rock star among Pharisees. This was a guy who had high priest written all over him, even though the high priest generally came from the Sadducees.

Paul's testimony, which we had read toward the end of the book of Acts, he talked about studying at the feet of Gamaliel. He was a very brilliant man. There may not have been anyone else that had such a handle and an understanding of the Old Testament like Paul did.

Now, of course, he didn't understand the Old Testament as pointing to Christ. That's something that he had to have his eyes open to. And Jesus did that for him when he was on the road to Damascus to round up Christians, to put them to death.

He had such a zeal for the word of God that he was willing to kill those whom he thought were usurping it. These Christians were throwing out the law. Paul just didn't realize that they were worshiping the one the law was pointing toward.

And Jesus showed himself to Paul and called him to be an apostle. And Paul even makes mention of that here in the very start of his letter to the book of Romans, saying that he received apostleship from Jesus to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations.

Paul no longer being a Pharisee unto the Jews, but he was now an apostle of Christ unto the nations preaching the gospel so that those who would hear the message of Jesus, the message of the kingdom, as I talked about in my sermon yesterday, I uploaded that kind of late.

But you can find the sermon on the broadcast as well. Anyway, the message of the kingdom Paul brought to the nation so that all who heard the gospel would turn from their sin, follow Jesus Christ and live.

And at the heart of this gospel message is this doctrine. We are saved by faith in Jesus Christ. That is the gospel. Like, of course, there's the message of the kingdom. Of course, there's the message of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, rising again from the grave, ascending into heaven, preparing a place for us.

He's coming again. All who are in Christ will dwell with him forever in glory. Absolutely. All of that is part of the gospel. But it's also the gospel to hear that we're saved by grace through faith, not by our works.

If it was by your works that you thought that you had to do in order to attain salvation, that wouldn't be good news because you would never have assurance of salvation. How do I know that I've done this the right way and therefore I'm saved and I'm going to get into heaven?

But you also would never even be able to attain salvation because you can't do the work well enough and good enough in order to merit the salvation that you need with God satisfying his wrath that is burning against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.

It is not good news to hear. You have to do something in order to be saved because we can never do enough to attain that salvation. We would never be able to do enough works to cover over the sin that we have committed against God, the rebellion that we have perpetrated against him, the treason that we have committed against the high king of the throne of heaven who reigns over all of the universe.

There's nothing that we can do to make up for our sin. So it is not good news to hear you must work in order to attain your salvation. The good news is Jesus has done the work for you. He accomplished everything through his life, death, resurrection.

You must have faith in him and it is by faith God has chosen to transmit all of the reward, the benefit, the treasures of his grace to us. Those who have faith in Jesus Christ. That's good news. That's the good news of the gospel.

And that's what Paul is communicating to the Romans here. It is the main point of this letter and it is so brilliantly stated and laid out in such fantastic theology. It is one of the greatest documents ever written.

Of course, we would say the Bible is the greatest book of all time. But as you're breaking down the Bible into respective books, 66 of them to be precise, Romans is just the most brilliant. Now we know that the apostle Paul was not writing stuff off the top of his head.

He wasn't just relying upon his own brilliance. He was being carried along by the Holy Spirit. But that's not to say that Paul was not a brilliant man. He was a very smart man. And the Lord used the knowledge and wisdom that Paul had in order to pen this particular letter, which has been read in the church for 2000 years since.

And we still labor over it and scratch our heads over it. And people have committed their entire lives to understanding it. It is a theologically rich book. Whenever we talk about systematic theology, whenever you hear that term, what we're talking about is picking a particular topic and going all the way through the Bible to find out how all of scripture communicates about that topic.

So an example of this would be Trinity. Say you wanted to do a systematic theological study of the Trinity. You would start in Genesis, you would go to Revelation, and what you're specifically looking for are all the different ways in which Trinity shows up in the scriptures.

How is it demonstrated thematically? How is it spoken about openly? How is it discussed literally? How is it put poetically? On and on it goes. The themes of Trinity that you would find throughout the Bible, that would be a systematic study of a particular doctrine.

It's what we call systematic theology. There is not a book of the Bible that is systematic theology. Systematic theology is something that we do. It's not, there's not a book of the Bible that lays out a systematic theological statement on something in particular.

But if there's any book that comes the closest, it's Romans. And it would be a systematic theology presentation of the doctrine of justification by faith. Romans comes the closest of any book of the Bible of being a systematic theology.

Romans 1:16-17 and the Thesis of the Letter

And here's the way that we have this book laid out. What we have looked at today has been Paul's introduction. It's a pretty lengthy introduction, but it concludes with one of the most famous verses in Romans.

Romans 1 16, for I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes to the Jew first and also to the Greek. And then there was a verse that Martin Luther really labored and struggled over.

That was verse 17 for in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. And I'll talk about why that was such a struggle for Martin Luther.

When we get to that particular verse, what comes after that is Paul brings into condemnation all men, whether they are Jew or Gentile, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. That's the point of Romans 1 18 through chapter three, about verse 21 or 22, somewhere in there, which he sums that up with for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

But up to we get to that point, the apostle Paul has spoken about how the Gentiles are under condemnation. The Jews themselves are under condemnation. None is righteous, not one. No one understands. No one seeks for God.

All have turned aside together. They have become worthless. Now it is necessary for Paul as he is laying out here a doctrine of justification by faith to first show us how unrighteous we are so that we will see God's righteousness.

And that's where Paul goes next. So from chapter three, about verse 21, all the way through chapter four, that's where Paul lays out God's righteousness, the saving righteousness that we receive by faith.

One of the hallmark verses in the doctrine of justification by faith is in chapter four, verse five to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly. His faith is counted as righteousness.

What comes next from chapters five through eight is the righteousness that results from the faith that we have in our Lord Jesus Christ. In chapters nine, 10 and 11, we have God's righteousness as it is displayed for Israel and God's righteousness as it is displayed for the Gentiles.

Even that call to go out and preach the gospel. Then in chapters 12 through 15, what we read is the results of living out the gospel. What are the practical implications for living out the righteousness of God in the life of a believer?

And then in about the midway part of chapter 15 through the end of chapter 16, we have the apostle Paul talking about his continued mission of declaring the righteousness of God to Jews and to Gentiles.

If there is a thesis statement to the book of Romans, a statement that carries forth through the rest of this book, it would be here in Romans 1 16. And you've probably heard this said before that this is the thesis statement to this book, a declaration of the gospel being justification by faith.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes by faith. We are justified to the Jew first and also to the Greek. And there's some background in understanding that statement as well, which we'll come back to again tomorrow, beginning our study in the book of Romans chapter one.

Let's conclude with prayer. Our heavenly father, we thank you for the gospel of Jesus Christ that has come to us. It has been proclaimed to us that we may hear and believe and so be saved. So may we walk in the light as he is in the light, walking in the righteousness of God that we have received by faith.

And may we come to understand this all the more, rejoicing in the glory and goodness of God, our savior, as we go through this book and see the wonderful treasure of your grace that has been demonstrated to us in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

We pray these things in Jesus name, amen.

Thank you for listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website www .wutt .com and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page.

Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study, When We Understand the Text.