We’re going to read together from Romans 1:16-17; two short verses in Paul’s very famous letter to the people of Rome. And Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who is the great preacher of the middle of the 20th century who preached in London and he’s a Welshman, he makes a really big claim about this passage. He says, “There are no two verses more important in Scripture than these. And these are the rock bottom foundation of Protestantism.” Now the reason he says that is because these are the two verses that Martin Luther, in the early 1500s, writes about in his famous story of what he calls his “tower experience.” And in his tower experience, he wrestled with Romans 1:16-17 and he says that he hated Romans 1:16-17. And he didn’t understand it. And then the Holy Spirit helped him to see what Paul was saying here, and this is what he writes – “Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There, a totally other face of the entirety of Scripture came upon me and showed itself to me.” You see, when Luther realized what Paul was saying here in Romans 1:17 in particular, it says it was like he had walked through the gates of paradise when he figured out what this means.
And no matter where you are today, whether you are a Christian or not, every single one of us needs to see what Paul has to say here in Romans 1:17 because when you get it and when you believe it, it is like entering through the gates of paradise itself. And so let’s pray together and then we’ll read it.
Father, we ask that You would send the Spirit to be with us and to help us as we read this amazing text that You have given. In Christ’s name we pray it, amen.
This is God’s Word:
“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 Paul’s main point here is to say, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” And you can read that little “for” in the very next sentence, very next clause, like a “because.” He says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God unto salvation.” And so we need to know how to not be ashamed of the Gospel, but let’s take it in reverse order. The first thing we’ve got to know is, “What is the Gospel? What does Paul say here is the Gospel, its definition?” We never graduate from that question, no matter how long we’ve been Christians. And then secondly we can think about how to not be ashamed of the Gospel. So let’s do that.
What is the Gospel?
First, “What is the Gospel?” A couple of things here. The first thing to point out is the word itself. Christians, we Christians use this word “gospel” all the time and the book of Romans uses the word more than any other letter. It appears 134 times in the New Testament. And it is the Greek word, “evangelion,” or “evangel.” And right there, commentators will point out how in the middle of that word is the word, “angel.” And that’s because an angel in Greek is not just a spirit, one of God’s spirits who comes down with a message. The word, “angel” simply means, “messenger.” Anybody who carries a message, in Greek, is an “angel.” And at the beginning of that word is an “ev” or an “eu,” which means, “good.” And so very, very literally, the word means, “good message.” If you’ve been at Sunday School for any time in your life, you know that we say the Gospel means, “good news.”
And as old hat as that translation might be for us, it is actually so critical to understand, to say something about Gospel itself, that it means “good news,” because in the first century Christians did not invent this word, “gospel; evangelion.” It was used all the time. The Romans, when they were out in war, the great empire, they would go out and they would defeat somebody, some barbarian tribe, and they would send an angel with an engelia, a messenger with a message, and he would go back to the city of Rome and stand on the hill outside Rome and wave the flag and it would say, “We won! I bring gospel! I bring good tidings, good news!” This was not originally a religious term. And we see it being used 500 years before Jesus Christ will ever be born. We see the word, “gospel,” popping up all over the place, as much as 500 years prior.
Now what this means, this word, the fact that Paul and Jesus and others chose to take that word and make it into the word that stands for the center message of all of Christianity is so critical. This is how one pastor puts it. “When you hear the word, ‘Gospel,’ you should think of a message that’s more like opening the newspaper than going to talk to a pastor.” You go to talk to a pastor, a psychologist or a counselor, and they’re there to give you advice on your life of how to get through some type of problem. That is not what the Gospel is like. The Gospel is not advice; it is news. It is opening the front page of the paper and being told something has happened, a history has taken place, God has done something in the center of all of human history. So just in the word itself, which Paul has used three times already by the time we get to Romans 1:16, it means that Christianity is unique. Because in any religion that says if you want to have salvation, if you want to see God, if you want to know what it’s like to get into the presence of God, and you need to do that by way of moral conformity, religious practices, your personal bloodline, culture, better habits, more discipline. Even being religious, that is not Gospel at all, because Gospel means “good history, good news.” That is advice, not Gospel. And Christianity is the only religion that comes and says, “We truly have news to tell, not advice to give.”
And so that means, secondly, we have to then ask, “What is the content of that Gospel” And that is exactly what Paul is doing here in Romans 1:17. If you look down at Romans 1:17, it’s a very famous little phrase. In the Gospel, “the righteousness of God is revealed.” Now when you look at that, the righteousness of God, it’s been revealed in the Gospel, and you say, “What is that?” then know that there have literally been millions of pages published on the question, “What does Paul mean by the phrase, ‘the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel’?” And this is exactly what drew Martin Luther to say what I mentioned earlier, that he hated Romans 1:16-17 in the 1500s. This is the key phrase of Paul and this is, some people will say, the key phrase of the Christian message from top to bottom – “the righteousness of God has been revealed in the Gospel.” And this is what Martin Luther wrote about it. He said, “When I encountered this, when I studied this, I did not love, yes, I hated this verse. The righteous God who punishes sinners and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly. I was angry with God for this. I labored as to how to understand Paul’s phrase, ‘the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel.’ I saw it anxiously, but the expression was locked from me.”
Now why did Luther say something like that? And the reason is, is because he knew what righteousness means. He knows what righteousness means. Righteousness means to be in total conformity to the character of God from top to bottom. And you know, every single one of us, whether you are a Christian today or not, no matter what you believe, we all feel the weight of guilt in our lives from time to time. And we all know that we – I think that, I’ve not been a pastor that long, but for as long as I have been, I have noticed in people that everybody senses to some degree that they ought to be perfect and they know that something is wrong with them. There are actions we are embarrassed about. There are thoughts in our thought life that we don’t want anybody to know. No matter what we believe, we feel the weight, the impingement of guiltiness in some way, shape or form in all of our lives. And Luther, Luther knew that, “If I am not perfect and righteous, conformed to the character of God, I will not get salvation; I will not get to see the living God,” which is salvation according to the Old Testament.
And when he came and he read this verse, he was crushed because what he thought was he thought Paul was saying that in the Gospel, the coming of Jesus Christ, God reveals just how righteous you have to be if you want to see God. “The righteousness of God has been revealed in the Gospel.” If you want to see God, look at Jesus Christ and you find out that’s how perfect you need to be. The life of Jesus. You remember, Jesus said it in the Sermon on the Mount – “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” And He walked through all sorts of situations in the Sermon on the Mount and you read them and you say, “I’ve done that. I’ve done that. I’ve done that. I can’t be this!” And so Luther said, “I hated this Gospel,” because Luther was a very, very religious person and he was a monk and he was so disciplined and he worshiped all day and he studied all day and he prayed all day and he confessed his sins all day, and he said, “I still cannot stop sinning. I won’t see God if that is what the Gospel means!” And so he said, “I hated the Gospel.”
Now when he had his tower experience, he broke through. The Holy Spirit opened his eyes to see what Paul is actually saying here, and when he said, “I realized it. Everything changed. I entered the gates of paradise.” So what does Paul mean here? Luther was wrong at the beginning. What does Paul mean here? And here is the best way, I think, to get it. Just to translate it a slightly different way, another way that is on offer. And this is how you can do it. “In the Gospel, God has revealed the righteousness provided by God to us.” In other words, Luther thought that in the Gospel we are simply being told, “If you want to enter into the presence of God, live just like Jesus lived. That’s the only way.” And if that’s true, then the Gospel is nothing but devastating news. And then he realized, “No, this is saying that the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel is a righteousness that God provides to us, a righteousness that we could never have unless it was given to us as a gift.” The righteousness of God is the gift of righteousness in the Gospel. And with that realization he broke through, he said, “I entered paradise.” This is what makes Christianity utterly different than every other religion – that at the very centerpiece, the claim is that, “Yes, you cannot enter into salvation, into the presence of God, without being righteous.” And God comes down and gifts that righteousness to us in the Gospel.
And we know this because of other verses. How do you know that’s what it means? Well Philippians 3:9 says this. “I do not have a righteousness of my own by works, by the law, but instead, righteousness has come to me through Jesus Christ by faith.” Righteousness comes to me only as a gift and no other way. It’s counted to me, even though it is not true of me. And we call that justification. Now that’s Paul’s very logical, didactic approach to telling us about it. If you need an image, there is a single metaphor that the Bible uses over and over again to describe this. And it’s the metaphor of clothing. And it pops up in the Old Testament and then reappears over and over again in the New Testament. Isaiah 64:6 – “My righteousness deeds are like wearing filthy garments.” And then the prophecy of the Gospel. Isaiah 61:10 – “God has clothed me now with garments of salvation. He has wrapped me in the robe of righteousness.” In other words, what Paul is saying here is that the Gospel says that the Father runs out to the prodigal on the horizon and throws over them a robe of cleanliness, of perfection, of righteousness, and that is a robe that the prodigal son did not make; he did not weave. It is a gift to him from top to bottom. And Paul says here it is for Jew and Greek, meaning it is for everybody. This is for anybody today. No matter what you’ve done, what your bloodline is, how many times you’ve sat here and perhaps not been clear on it, not believed it, not taken it in, not lived for it. This is for everybody today and it’s from faith for faith, meaning you get it by faith from top to bottom; no other way. Only through belief. Only through trust. Only through faith in every single way.
Now I want to close this point and go to a very brief second point by just asking, “How?” Because this gift of righteousness is free to the unrighteous but not free to God. And one of the great Russian novelists is Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky is one of those authors who you had to read in high school, Crime and Punishment, and you were incredibly bored by and probably told your teacher you read it but didn’t actually. And then you come later in life and you read it again perhaps and you realize that it’s a masterpiece; that he’s brilliant. And he wrote another book, famous book, called, The Brothers Karamazov. And there’s this really long chapter in it about the horrors of human suffering. And Dostoevsky was a Christian and in his books one of the things he’d try to do was to put the case against Christianity stronger than his atheist friends who he hung out with a lot would often put it to him. And so he focuses this book on suffering.
And in it, there’s this chapter where Ivan, the main character, who was raised in faith, watches all these different people go through absolute misery. And the climax is when a young mother loses her only child at a very young age. And Dostoevsky had lost his son at the age of three years old and so he is reliving this in this novel. And at one point, the main character, Ivan, says this. “I don’t want to belong to a universe where children suffer like that.” And the question of the novel is, “Is there hope in this kind of a world where people suffer from top to bottom and where parents do sometimes bury young children?” And the way that Dostoevsky answers it is by two scenes with the younger brother and the older brother of Ivan. In one horrible moment, Ivan seeks this tragic suffering and his younger brother comes to him and gives him a hug and kisses him on the cheek. And Dostoevsky is shouting, “If there is to be hope for the world, this unrighteous world that we live in, the love has to be metaphysically real. It can’t just be brain synapses firing and chemicals being produced throughout your nervous system. There has got to be a love underneath the love.” And he displays that through the little brother. But then the older brother in a later scene stands up in the middle of a courtroom and confesses his guilt to a murder that he did not commit. And he says that if he does not do it there will be no justice for the victim.
And you see what Dostoevsky is saying. He’s saying that the only answer for hope in such an unrighteous reality as ours is, where we are unrighteous and the world is broken in unrighteousness, that love is real but not even that is enough. There would actually also have to be an elder brother who would stand up in the midst of the great courtroom and say, “I am righteous but I will go to death for the unrighteous.” And Dostoevsky says that that is the only possibility. You see, the offer of the Gospel, the righteousness, the gift, is free to you today if you just say, “That is my God and I believe it and I trust it and I want it.” That’s it! But it is not free to God. The true Elder Brother Himself had to go to an ultimate death; the righteous one standing in place for the unrighteous. We ought to see ourselves in the Gospel story in one place, and that’s Barabbas. When the people shout out, “Let Barabbas go and kill, murder this holy one, the King of Israel!” – we are that Barabbas. The righteous goes to death and we Barabbases go free, and that is the Gospel. That is the righteousness that has been revealed. It is a gift from faith for faith. And that’s why one pastor puts it like this – we can never say, a person, we cannot say, you cannot say today that, “I am really trying to be a Christian.” Christianity is not an attempt; it’s a status because it’s thoroughly gifted through the fact of the historical Jesus Christ from top to bottom.
How to Not be Ashamed of the Gospel
But what you can do today is respond in faith and secondly respond in being unashamed. And we’ll only touch on this as a close this morning. Paul says here in the first verse, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” And we know that Paul was not ashamed of the Gospel. He says, “I glory in the gospel.” He suffered for the Gospel. We know he was not ashamed of the Gospel. But there were people in the New Testament that were ashamed of the Gospel and there were Romans that he was writing to that were ashamed of the Gospel. Second Timothy 1:8, he had to say to Timothy, in the Bible, “Do not be ashamed of the Lord Jesus or of me, His prisoner.” So it must have been the case that Timothy was actually struggling with being ashamed of the Gospel that he preached.
Immediately the reader, we, have to ask this question. It’s an obvious one. “Am I ashamed of the Gospel?” And Martyn Lloyd-Jones, he gives this striking comment about this. This is what he says. “If you have never known the temptation of being ashamed of the Gospel, it is probably not due to the fact that you are an exceptionally good Christian, but that your understanding of the Christian Gospel has never been clear.” And he says that because the Gospel is naturally offensive. It’s explicitly offensive. And Lloyd-Jones says that the world always ridicules the message of the Gospel one way or another. Now Paul said that. He said to the Jewish people of the time that the Gospel was, “a stumbling block.” And that’s because they expected the Messiah to come in great power. And what we have in the gospels is a poor, carpenter’s son who came from Nazareth, which is like nowhere, who was despised and rejected by His own people, His own family, who was an enemy of the state, who dies by the hands of the ones the Jewish people expected Him to conquer. And they say, in other words, “The Gospel, that Gospel you proclaim, is too weak.”
And when you come to what the Greeks said about it, Paul says that the Greeks thought the Gospel was foolishness. And the Greeks are just like modern progressive people today in the United States. They said, “The Gospel is foolishness.” You know the Greeks said, “We know too much about philosophy to believe that.” And today, modern progressives say, “We know too much about science to believe that.” And I recently heard Joe Rogan, who is the most famous podcaster in the world right now, say, “When are we going to stop talking about Jesus? We know too much. Science has taught us too much to still be talking about this man.” And you see, the modern progressives, like the Greeks, said the Gospel is too simple and so they ridiculed it.
And the world religions look at the Christian Gospel and say, “You’re telling me all you’ve got to do is believe and you’ll be clothed in eternal righteousness? That is too easy! Where’s the justice? Where’s the religion? Where’s the practices? Where’s the moral discipline to get into the kingdom? The Gospel is too weak. It’s too simple. It’s too easy.” And the Romans, just like Friedrich Nietzsche said in the 19th century the Romans would have said the same thing – they would have said, they would have said, “If God really is going to come down, He’s not going to be like that. He’s going to be like Hercules. He’s going to have big muscles.” And Nietzsche said that if God really existed and really came down, then nobody would have a choice but to worship Him. He would be too powerful. He would overwhelm with power in the midst of the world. And so Nietzsche said, “The Gospel is only for weak people.”
And I imagine that Paul, he says in verse 15, “I want to come to Rome and preach the Gospel.” And if you’ve been to Rome you know this – you step into Rome and it is a place of pomp and grandeur like nowhere else in the world. And he would have been in the midst of that architecture saying, “Believe on this poor man from Nazareth! You’ve never heard of that place, and He is the Savior of the world. Your government killed Him but He rose again!” They laughed at Him, and that’s because everywhere the Gospel goes, if it’s clear, it will be ridiculed.
And today as we close, you know, you can say today in the 21st century that, “Jesus Christ is my inspiration for an ethical life,” and that’s okay. And you can say that, “Jesus is one of the great religious options among many,” and that’s okay. And you can say in Jackson, Mississippi that, “Jesus is the God who rounds out my life and brings me that wholesome religious element to my otherwise busy life,” and that’s okay. But if you come today and say, “Jesus Christ is the Man of history who really is God, who claims holistic kingship upon me, who is the exclusive hope of all of humanity, who really did die and really did rise from the dead, who calls upon me to give my time, talent and treasure in every way,” then the world will hate that Gospel because that Gospel says, “I am a moral failure, a spiritual failure, that suffering is normal, that I need help from top to bottom, and that my life is not my own.” And that Gospel is a Gospel to ridicule.
And we have to ask the question as we close, “Am I ashamed of that Gospel?” And I think one way of getting at that is just to ask, “Do my colleagues and neighbors of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years around me know that I am a person who really serves Jesus Christ? Or do I slide into the life of the world just like everybody else?” Now the truly last word. Lloyd-Jones points out, he asks, “Why does Paul tell us here that we should be unashamed?” And there’s a reason here for not being ashamed and it can’t be this – we can’t say today, “I’m not ashamed of the Gospel, I love the Gospel, I believe the Gospel because I’ve believed in Christ for 20, 30, 40, 50 years and it’s meant so much to me and it’s been helpful to me and it’s made me sleep better and it’s given me a lighter step to my life and it really fulfills me.” That cannot be the reason why we are unashamed of the Gospel because anybody from any religious background or anybody who reads a public intellectual and says, “They really helped me,” can say something like that. It can’t be subjective. If it’s only subjective then it is not hope.
But he tells us the reason here and it’s simply this. “For in the Gospel, there is the power unto salvation.” And you see what he’s saying here? It’s not subject; it’s objective. We must believe and be unashamed of the Gospel. The Christian claim is because the Gospel is real, that it really happened, that Jesus really did die and rise again and it’s the truth no matter what we feel like. And for that reason, it is power from top to bottom. It changed the world because it’s real and it’s true. It’s not feelings, but theology that makes us unashamed. And so for that reason, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ did rise from the dead and now today it is possible to stand in His presence and be welcomed by God the Father by faith. That is truth. Let’s believe it and be unashamed. Let’s pray.
Father, we give thanks for the glory of the Gospel, the righteousness revealed in Jesus. And we ask that You would give us the gift of faith today in Jesus’ name, amen.