God's Saving Gospel (Romans 1.1 - 8.39)

Introduction

The epistle to the Romans is the longest letter in the Bible. Actually, it’s by far the longest letter we have from the ancient world by any writer. So what’s it all about, and why is it so long?

Some see Romans as the nearest Paul ever got to writing a complete systematic theology; Paul’s mature theological summary, his magnum opus, like Calvin's Institutes, as if one day he sat down and thought, “I really should write a comprehensive volume that covers the whole sweep of how I see God, man, life, the universe and everything.”

But it is, in fact, a pastoral letter addressing a practical issue in a unique church for a particular reason as we shall see next week.

It would take several years of Sunday sermons to do Romans justice. We could easily lose ourselves for months on end unravelling and getting to grips with Paul’s tightly-packed thinking. When Peter says “Paul’s letters contain some things that are hard to understand” (2 Peter 3.16) he was no doubt thinking of this epistle. It is a demanding read, let’s not pretend otherwise.

But we’re not going to spend 2-3 years going through Romans, though that would be an excellent thing to do. For a start, you'd need a better Bible teacher than me to take you through this letter line by line. Instead, what we’re going to do is this: instead of covering the entire book verse-by-verse, we are going to cover chapters 1-11 in just two weeks. 

This will give us a feel for the overall flow of the more doctrinal part of the letter, before we dig down into the more practical section in chapters 12-16 over a term.

This week, I am going to give you an overview of Romans chapters 1-8. Next Sunday, I’ll do the same for chapters 9-11 which is I believe not (as some say) a parenthesis, a bit of an aside, but actually the key to understanding the whole letter. 

The task I have given myself today feels like having to summarise Tolstoy’s War and Peace on the back of a match box. Where do I start? It’s impossible to do it justice, but here we go…

Let’s start with the basics. The letter is written by the Apostle Paul, and it's after the three missionary journeys we know all about from Acts, and it’s written to the church in imperial Rome which he did not found, and had never visited. 

Why did he write it? He hints at the end of the letter that he is looking for a new western base for the next phase of his ministry towards Spain, but in chapter 1 he says he also wants to give them something to make them strong. It seems he wants to establish contact for their mutual benefit. We’ll explore this in depth in the weeks and months to come.

In a word, chapters 1-8 are all about the gospel. Of all systems of belief, religious or secular, Christianity is the only one that has a gospel.

It’s the only one that doesn’t say, “Once you’ve attained the standard, you get the prize. Or once you’re good enough, then God will love you.”

Instead, Christianity says, “You, like everyone else, have blown your chances of ever attaining the standard, so instead of a prize for good behaviour, here’s a gift you don’t deserve. Take it.” As Tim Keller says, “Christianity is not about being nice. It's about being new.” 

Chapter 1

Before we can ever appreciate the gospel, which means “good news”, we have to understand just how bad the bad news is - which Romans spells out in great detail in chapters 1. It says that whatever we do, and however hard we try, we always end up gravitating down to sinful desires. 

Sin is a spectrum. At the extreme end, it spirals totally out of control. 50 million victims of Stalin. 30 million under Mao. We all know about Hitler. Bodies and fields full of bones in Cambodia and Rwanda, and Bosnia and Iraq and Syria and I could go on. Our species is a finely tuned killing machine. We even make war on our unborn.

2 million children are exploited for sex by perverts every year. More than 300 years after a period called “The Enlightenment” modern slavery is on the rise.

Some of our estates are no-go areas. We have become accustomed to repeated cycles of fatherlessness leading to crime and violence; the schools can’t correct it, the police can’t control it, and successive governments are powerless to stop it. 

Sin ruins everything and Romans starts by saying exactly that.

Staring hard in the face at the decadent society Rome had become, Paul says the brakes are off in four areas; 

1) mounting sexual impurity, particularly unnatural sexual relationships. 

2) increasing family breakdown (he talks about disobedience to parents and infidelity).

3) a growth in aggressive atheism (he talks God-haters who don’t think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God).

4) soaring antisocial behaviour (he talks about slander, insolence, murder, strife and depravity).

And he says, “You can tell when God’s wrath is over a civilisation because this is what starts to happen. It’s all there in Romans 1; read it for yourself and ask whether you think God is OK with the Western world. 

He isn’t. His wrath is like a pan of milk that simmers away for years – centuries even, because he is slow to anger, and abounding in love. But there comes a day when it suddenly boils over and all the signs are there in our culture that his patience is running thin.

Chapters 2-3

But just as all good, respectable Christians start tutting and sitting in judgement over all those sinners, chapters 2 and 3 say, “Wait a minute! Is your heart always virtuous and pure? Do you always do the right thing? You cannot criticise because you’re in the same sinking boat; we all are. We’re all without excuse for our sin and subject to God’s judgement. All have sinned and fall short.” 

Every person, one way or another, makes a judgement about God: whether to love God or leave him out of their lives; whether to acknowledge and follow his revelation or ignore it and go their own way.

And God has fixed a day when he will pronounce a verdict on each human being for the verdict that they made about him.

But the first two words of Romans 3.21 signal a dramatic turnabout. “But now…” It’s like the collapse of the Berlin Wall on a cosmic-scale. You see, the more your eyes are opened to see your own flaws and sins, the more precious, electrifying, and stunning God’s grace appears to you.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones once preached a whole 45-minute sermon on those two words. “But now…” They are words that announce that everything has changed. “But now… ”God has intervened, not in wrath, though we would have no complaint if it was. Instead, he has decisively stepped in and changed everything by showing grace.

Have you ever been struck by lightning? You don’t want to be! The electrical charge of a lightning bolt can exceed a billion volts. That wouldn’t feel all that nice.

On 2nd July 1505, a young student was travelling to university. On one part of the journey, he met a thunderstorm and, as the rain pelted down, suddenly a bolt of lightning struck the ground just a few feet away from where he was. He was terrified of death and divine judgement. He was filled with dread, and he cried out, “Oh no! The righteousness of God! I’m damned!” 

That man was Martin Luther. And that thought of God’s fearsome wrath consumed him for years. He became one of the most zealous and disciplined monks in the monastery but he was gripped with an obsession about God’s righteousness.  

During mass his thoughts filled him with anxiety and dread. He physically trembled and had panic attacks just thinking about God’s ominous and awesome greatness. So aware was Luther of the darkness in his heart, of his utter unworthiness, that he was sure he could never stand before God and live. 

But one day, tormented by fear and unworthiness, his world was rocked to its core. The discovery he made that day changed the course of history. Like a bolt from the blue, he saw that the righteousness of God is not that terrifying divine rage that could damn him in an instant. 

No! The righteousness of God is the unblemished record, the pure goodness of Jesus Christ that God wants to give us. And Luther made that discovery right here in Romans 3.22: “This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.”

That’s the gospel and here’s what the gospel does: 

Paul Cowley was brought up on one of the roughest estates in Manchester. His father was an alcoholic. He left school at fifteen. He ran away from home. He lived on the streets. He joined a gang. He got involved in crime and ended up in prison. When he came out he joined the army. His relationships were chaotic. He went through two marriages and two divorces.

In 1994, he walked into a church and signed up for an Alpha course. It changed his life. He gave his life to Christ and was filled with the Holy Spirit. 

Then he started visiting prisoners. He founded an organisation to care for ex-offenders. He set up a homeless project. He created courses to help people struggling with addictions, with depression and debt.

Under his leadership, Alpha for Prisons has spread through the jails in the UK and seventy-six countries around the world. Thousands of men and women, mostly men, have come to faith in Jesus Christ and been found churches who help them reintegrate into society. The ministries he now heads up have the potential to touch millions of lives around the world.

That’s the gospel; a righteousness given to you, and reckoned as wholly yours, that comes not through self-help or short, sharp shocks, or government handouts - but through faith.

Thank God for social action - let’s do more of it - but it’s not enough on its own. The evangelist Vance Havner once said, “If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich but he never would have gone home.” 

The gospel of grace gets you home and makes peace between you and God forever.

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 3-4 of Romans explain what this looks like in detail and it’s given a name: “justification.” 

Who has ever heard of a magistrate who passed sentence on a guilty defendant and then did the community service, or served the time or paid the fine himself? I spent ages on Google last week trying to find one example of such a thing to illustrate justification for you – and I found nothing. 

Why not? Because judges never step in and serve the sentences that they pass down to the guilty offenders standing before them in the dock. It just doesn’t happen! 

But one did. Jesus, the innocent one, who will judge the living and the dead, served the death penalty for you and me so we can walk out of court free men and women, all charges dropped, and our case dismissed.

Chapters 3-4 tell us about mercy (which is not getting the spiritual death we deserve). But because God loves us, he wants to give us more than mercy.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5 is about grace (which is being given the abundant life we don’t deserve). It says, “We have peace with God.” Anxiety? Sorted. Guilt? Wiped away. Hopelessness? Banished. Dread of God’s wrath? Gone. Estrangement from God? It’s history.

It says that God’s love is just poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It says, however badly sin messed us up, Jesus is able to set things right.

Oxford-based church leader Simon Ponsonby sees it as like the card game, Top Trumps. Did you ever play that game? Paul in Romans 5 plays spiritual Top Trumps. Our former life as sinners (‘in Adam’ he calls it), and our new life having been given (as if it’s ours) the righteousness of Christ. 

Adam lays down his card “sin.” Jesus lays own his card “righteousness.” Jesus is top trump. Adam lays down the card “condemned” – that should do it. But Jesus lays down the card “justified.” Jesus is top trump. Adam puts down the card “death.” Jesus just smiles and throws down the card “life.” Jesus is top trump. 

Whatever card our old sinful DNA, that we inherited from Adam, lays down Jesus has a card to beat it. “Where sin increased grace increased all the more.”

Chapters 6-7

Chapters 6-7 are all about freedom. Because the gospel is not just something that happened once and that’s it. It goes on with a life-transforming power in your life.

You are being loosed, you are being freed, you are being released from crippling bondage to sin, and from crippling bondage to law. 

What does that mean? Law means trying to appease God by mechanical religious duty. There are people who think that if you just do the ritual right, even if you don’t really like it, God will accept you. He just likes a bit of religion so just placate him and it’ll all be fine. But God hates cold, hard-hearted, grudging religious duty. The Bible says it makes him sick.

It’s why Saint Teresa of Avilla once ran out of her dreary monastery and prayed, “From silly devotions and sour-faced saints, spare us O Lord!” The gospel frees us from all that. Thank God!

And chapter 7 ends by saying that despite all God has done for us, there is a spiritual battle in all of us. How do we win the battle? We win when we believe that God’s promises are true and better than the empty promises of sin.

Chapter 8

Then finally, chapter 8 brings this majestic doctrinal opening half of the letter to an end. It’s all about assurance that the Holy Spirit brings to your heart. 

If you knew that this afternoon you would have to stand before the God, whom the Bible describes as a holy and consuming fire, to learn your eternal fate, would you look forward to it?

An angel opens a door, looks at a clipboard, rubs his hands and says, “Welcome to the final judgement. Please make yourself comfortable…” A big screen starts a countdown. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

This is a recording of the inside of your mind. Everybody you know is a special guest, looking on. What certificate is this film; PG or X-rated?

Your mouth is dry. Your palms are sweaty. You watch the show, you cringe all the way through, then you feel a lump in your throat as you wait for the verdict.

What’s God going to say? Will it be “Welcome home, well done” or will it be “Well, that was disappointing”? Or worse still, will it be “Who are you? I never knew you?” 

Romans 1-8 explains that, if you’re a Christian, God does not consider your performance. He considers Christ’s performance. That’s what it means to be in Christ; everything that is true of him becomes true for you.

And according to Romans 8, if you are a Christian believer, because of Jesus, no matter what the film of your inner life contains, the words ‘not guilty’ are indelibly tattooed onto your soul. No condemnation means no condemnation.

And according to Romans 8, you are completely set free from the power and penalty of sin and spiritual death and able to be led by the Holy Spirit.

And according to Romans 8, you are loved from all eternity, a child of God, adopted and made an heir of all the riches of heaven.

And according to Romans 8, God has given you all you need to be sure that you belong to him. Your eternal security is anchored in him, stretching back into eternity past, before time began - and before you existed.  

And according to Romans 8, you are foreknown by God from before creation, predestined by God and chosen by God to be like Jesus.

And according to Romans 8, God is on your side and nothing can defeat you. God has declared you to be inseparable from his love for all eternity.

Ending

This is a true portrait of who you are in Christ - and all of that is from this magnificent section of the Bible we call Romans 8.

That’s the truth. That’s the gospel truth. Believe it. Treasure it. Savour it. 

Let’s stand to pray…

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 16 June 2019