Father thank you that we can open your word and See what you have to say to us Lord. We thank you that we can come and worship you in song and worship you in our giving and we pray now Lord that Our worship in the preaching of your word would be a sweet aroma to you. Father, I just ask that you would put Jesus on glorious display, Lord, that we would see his majesty and his excellency, that we would see our need of him and we would glorify you for what you have done for us through him. Holy Spirit, I pray that you would come and convict us where we need to be convicted, that you would shine the spotlight on Christ, and that you would draw us ever so closer to Him. Father, we ask that you would be with those who aren't here today father that are traveling That are sick that are healing lord. We thank you for uh, lori and chad lord, we thank you that her surgery was successful we Praise you for these things lord. We just ask now that you would heal her for dick's travels as he has arrived safely we thank you for that and we just ask that you would Continue to have your hand on Everything that is going on in this little church father. Thank you for those that are visiting today. I pray that It would be a blessing to them for sure So we just thank you now and ask that it would all be given to you in Jesus name. Amen So what what are you confident in? What are you convinced of and what are you proud of? Now, the answer to this could be different for everybody, and it probably is different for everybody. So you could be confident in yourself. You can be confident in the work that you do. You could be confident in the talent you have. You can be convinced of what's the right way, what's the wrong way. You can be proud of the person you are, the kids that you've raised, the kids that you're raising, or the way that you've just lived your life. These are things that we can be proud of. But what we see next in Romans is what Paul was confident in, what Paul is convinced of, and what Paul was proud of. And it simply is the gospel. And he unpacks this for the next 15 chapters that he's not ashamed of, the gospel. Now what about you? Are you convinced of the gospel? Are you confident in the gospel? And are you proud of the gospel? Well, let's look at what Paul says. Look with me at Romans 1, 16 and 17. This is where we'll spend our time today. Paul says this, 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 to faith. as it is written, but the righteous will live by faith. So what we see is, this is a continuation actually of the introduction. And we see that Paul is eager to preach the gospel to the Romans like we saw last week. But why he is eager to preach this gospel is because of the fact that he is not ashamed of it. Because he knows it is the power of God unto salvation. He knows within it is the righteousness of God. And he unpacks this in his letter. So we see this, he's not ashamed of it. This ashamed is to feel shame for something. All of us have felt shame for something in our lives that we have done that is wrong. And what Paul is saying is that he's not ashamed of this. There's no shame in claiming the gospel. We should not be shameful of something that we're convinced of or that we're confident in. We should be bold to proclaim the gospel. Not to be ashamed. Listen to what Jesus tells us in Luke 9 26. He says, For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory, in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. Paul writes it this way in 2 Timothy 1.8, And Peter in 1 Peter 4.16 writes, Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name. So we are not to be people who are ashamed of who our Lord and our Savior is, but we should be those that with confidence we boldly proclaim the gospel. Kent Hughes writes this, he says, we must never be ashamed. Paul said this because he knew of the human proclivity to be embarrassed or to deny what we know to be true. The wonder is God is not ashamed of us. I love that, that God is not ashamed of us. Therefore, we should not be ashamed of Him. We are His children. He calls us His children, and we should call Him our Father and our Lord. Now, we might sit here in church and be like, oh, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. Now what happens when you have opportunity to share the gospel with someone who's not a believer? See, it's easy to share the gospel in here because we all believe the gospel. But what about to unbelievers? Are we ashamed in that way? Or maybe it's not that we're ashamed of it, but maybe we're afraid of rejection. Maybe we're afraid they're gonna reject us. Maybe we're afraid they're gonna reject the message. There's many things that we can look at. But Paul, in this context, he's saying that he's eager to proclaim that gospel. Now, what's that gospel he's going to proclaim? Well, 1 Corinthians 15, 1-4 tells us the simplicity of the gospel. He said, now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. Here comes the gospel. For I deliver to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, And that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. That's the simplicity of the gospel. Christ died according to scriptures for our sin. He was buried and he was raised. That's the purest sense of the gospel that we deliver. You see, the gospel is good news, but before we get the good news, we have to have the bad news, right? We have to have the bad news that we are sinners and we are in need of a savior because there's nothing we can do to save ourselves. We can't work our way to heaven. We need someone to come and do the work for us. And that's what Christ has done. Therefore, when we repent of our sin and we turn to Christ and we ask him to save us and we put our trust in him, he does the saving work. And God reckons to us his righteousness by faith. This is the simplicity of the gospel. Also in 2 Corinthians 4.4, he puts it this way. In their case, this is of the gospel, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. We see what the light of the gospel is. The gospel is what? It is Christ. Christ is the gospel. He is the good news, right? That's why when we read, we have the gospel of Matthew, the gospel of Luke, the gospel of Mark, the gospel of John. It's the good news of Jesus Christ. But when other people don't see it, Paul writes to us in Corinthians and he tells us it's because the God of this world has blinded them to see that. The only reason, brothers and sisters, that you have seen that light of the glory of God in Christ of the gospel is because God has opened your eyes. That is why we see it, that is why we respond to it, because God does the work in us. He's the one drawing us to him, and that is why we respond, because of the work he does in us. Now, Paul uses four words to describe the gospel in this section, and that's what we're gonna concentrate on now. The first word he uses is power. So this is a miraculous power, a strength. Now, we all know through some of the teachings that we've had that God is all-powerful. That is what He is. He's all-powerful. He's all-knowing. He's everywhere present. So there's nothing that God cannot do because He's all-powerful. Now, the scripture here It speaks of God's power. The scriptures fully speak of it. Listen to these things. In Exodus, it's God's glorious power. In Deuteronomy, we read of his irresistible power. Job, his unsearchable power, his mighty power. The Psalms talk about his great power, his incomparable power. His strong power. Isaiah speaks of His everlasting power, His effectual power. And Romans talks about His sovereign power. So we see God's power throughout all of Scripture we see it. And this is the power to bring salvation. Psalms 110, listen to what the psalmist writes, it says, the Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your enemies. In Jeremiah 23, 29, in describing his word, he says this, it's not my word like fire, declares the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces. In 1 Corinthians 2.4, and my speech and my message, Paul says, were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and of power. In 1 Thessalonians 1, 5, because of our gospel came to you, not only in word, but also in power in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. In Hebrews 4, 12 says this is what the power of the word does, which is God's word. It says, for the word of God is living and it's active and it's sharper than any two-edged sword. piercing to the division of the soul and of the spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and the intentions of the heart. Simply to put, the gospel is the power of God for salvation. This is how people are saved. It's through the preaching of the word of God. That's where the power resides, within the gospel. Paul uses a second word is salvation. This is a deliverance or a rescue, right? So we are, we were saved, we're being saved, and we will be saved. This is kind of the progression that we have. But Paul here talks about this deliverance. In Psalms 106.8, the writer writes about God saving His chosen people. He says in Psalms 106.8, Yet He saved them for His namesake, that He might make known His mighty power. So we have to understand that our salvation, is it for us? Yes, it is for us. It's to escape God's wrath, it's to escape the pit of hell, but yet God does it in spite of us, not because of us. He doesn't look down and see some inherent good in us, and that's why he saves us, no. He does it for his name's sake. It's all for His glory, all for His praise. It's not of our works. We read this in Titus 3, 5. These aren't up there. He saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. Again, it's not by our works. Salvation is because God chose us. These aren't in here. If you want to, you can go to Ephesians 1, but it's because God chose us. In Ephesians 1-4, he says, even as He chose us in Him, when? Before the foundations of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love. Salvation is for God's glory and praise, as he continues in Ephesians 1, 5, and 6. He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will. Notice it wasn't our will. Our salvation is according to the purpose of His will. to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us and the beloved. You and I sit here saved people because of Christ's death, because Christ took our sin upon himself. He bore our sin in his body. By his wounds we're healed. He was the one that took all of our transgressions upon himself. Ephesians 1 says it this way, in him, this is Jesus, we have redemption through his blood, through his death we are redeemed. The forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace. So we see this power to save and this salvation that we have is for his glory, for his grace. And Paul understood this. I mean, think about who Paul was when he was Saul, right? I mean, he was holding the cloaks of everybody that was stoning Stephen in Acts 8. And then in Acts 9, he was going and dragging Christians to prison and killing them. And he talks about how he persecuted the church. This man understood the sinfulness of sin. He says at his death that he's the chief of sinners. This is who Paul saw himself as. And he saw the power of God in salvation when he meets Jesus Christ on that road to Damascus. And his whole life is changed. And this is what he was not ashamed of because he had this miraculously changed life. So Paul knew, and you and I know, salvation brings deliverance from sin. Right? Listen to Matthew 121. She will bear a son, you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins. But not only that, but it delivers us from death. Romans 5, or Romans 6, 23. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. From the wrath of God, Romans 5, 9. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. When we read through the Bible, the interesting thing that we see is even in that verse, right? If we look at that verse, much more we shall be saved by Christ from the wrath of God. Now we know that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit are three in one. So what has Christ saved us from? He saved us from Him. He saved us from His wrath. What amazing love is this, is that He would take us who are so deserving of His wrath and say, no, I'm gonna take that wrath upon me on the cross so that you can have my righteousness and you can have the glories of heaven when you die. This is, we are delivered from his wrath, we are delivered from darkness. Listen to 1 Peter 2, 9. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellency of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. We no longer walk in darkness. We walk in light. This is how we are. This is what salvation brings to us. Third, Paul uses to describe the gospel with the word believe or faith. And this is to trust in, to have faith. You and I display faith every day in our lives. Even unbelievers display faith in our lives, right? How many of you guys came in here? And ladies, how many of you men and women? How many of you? I didn't see any of you do this, but did any of you test the chairs to make sure they were gonna hold you? Or did you just display faith and sit down in that chair because you had faith it would hold you? Very simple. You displayed faith when you sat down in the chair. This is what you do. We display faith that our cars will work when we get up in the morning. Faith that the hot water came on in the shower this morning. This is things that we display all through our lives and all through day we have faith. But that's not the faith Paul's talking about here. Paul's talking about a supernatural faith. This is a faith that God gives to us, he grants to us in Ephesians 2.8. It says, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing, it is the gift of God. So the very faith you have, in Christ, the faith that you had to respond to this gospel was given to you by God. This is what the apostle is saying. It's not of your own doing, but it's the gift of God. God has gifted you that faith. So whether you said a prayer or you walked down an aisle or you raised your hand, the whole reason you did all of that is because God had already gifted you the faith to do that. Why did you pray? Because God's already given you faith. You didn't pray to have faith. No, you prayed because you had faith. This is the gift of God to us. So it's all to his praise. Salvation, therefore, has no human limits. Salvation is for all mankind, regardless of your race, your gender, your nationality. Paul describes that when he uses the terms to the Jew first and then to the Gentile. Now the Romans in this time, we have to understand the Romans would have been, the Roman church and most of the churches would have been really familiar with their Old Testament. Probably more than we're really familiar with the Old Testament, right? Because when he says to the Jew first, we realize that when Jesus came, he came to the Jew first. This is what he did in Matthew 15, 24, he says this. He answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. So we know that Jesus came to the Jew first. And in Matthew 10.6 he says, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The apostles were sent out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The Gentiles are still part of the plan. Don't get me wrong. But this is to the Jew first. And they would have understood this. But salvation is for all. It wasn't like, okay, hold on, the Jews rejected him and so now I gotta take a different plan and I gotta go to the Gentiles. No, because we see where God saved Gentiles even in the Old Testament, right? We see that with Rahab. We see that with Ruth, right? We see that with both of them. And so it's for all, this is who the gospel is for. It's all who believe, right? Salvation to everyone who believes. To the Jew and to the rest of the world. That's where Gentiles would be. Gentiles would be to the rest of the world. So to all who believe. Fourthly, the gospel displays the righteousness of God. Look at verse 17. This is for in it, this is the gospel. For in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Now, there's three interpretations of how we can look at this righteousness, right? And these are out of Douglas Moo's commentary on Romans. The first one says this, the righteousness of God is an attribute of God. So this righteousness of God could be referring to God's faithfulness. Now, all of these interpretations are biblically accurate, because we see that God's righteousness is described as God's faithfulness to you and I. Secondly, the righteousness from God. It's not only his attribute, but it's a righteousness from him. God gives the person who believes a new legal standing before him, right? Essentially what God does to the believer when that righteousness comes, when he justifies you and I, that we are justified by faith, meaning that God has declared you and I to be righteous, what he is doing is he is saying before him now in the courts, you are not guilty. That's the judgment, because he has declared you to be righteous. Because he is righteous, and because of what Christ has done on the cross, right, 2 Corinthians 5, 21, God takes our unrighteousness and gives it to Christ, and he takes Christ's righteousness, his perfect righteousness, and he gives it to us. That's what that is saying. And then thirdly, a righteousness done by God. Now this is an action of putting in the right being done by God. It is God's intervention to set right what has gone wrong with his creation. And we see that God does all of these things. The only thing that we don't see is that the context of what Paul is saying with this righteousness is it's not clear. He doesn't define what the righteousness is. He just says the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel. But even the righteousness of God in his justice, right, in him being just and holy, we see within the gospel because that's what Christ bore on the cross for us was God's justice. was God's wrath towards our sin. That is what we see. So we see all of God's righteousness, his attributes, what is from him, and what he has done in the gospel to make us righteous. Douglas Moo, this is what he writes. He says, God's righteousness is the righteousness of faith. The upshot is that righteousness of God in Paul is personal and relational. It speaks not just about God's work in Christ on the cross, but more directly of his work in individual human lives, as he puts those who respond to the gospel in faith in right relationship to him. This is what we have done. When we respond to that gospel, we are now in a right relationship with God, right? Christ has reconciled us through his body. We're in this right relationship with God. We are no longer enemies of God. Right? We have peace with God because we've been justified is what Romans 5.1 tells us. But also this righteousness of God, Paul talks about of having in Romans 3, 8, 9, he says, indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish in order that I may gain Christ. And be found in him not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law. but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith. And then again in Romans 321, he talks about this righteousness and he says, but now the righteousness of God, what we just looked at, has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. What a beautiful righteousness he has given us. And this is what Paul is saying in Philippians. He's like, I would give up everything to have that righteousness. All the perfect stuff I thought I did under the law, he goes, it's not worth holding onto for the surpassing riches of knowing who Christ is and that righteousness that I have. But not only this, the righteous man, he says, now lives by faith. Do you live by faith, brothers and sisters? I don't necessarily know if I live every moment by faith, but I live by faith, not fully and completely. Listen to Hebrews 2.4. Behold his soul, behold his soul. Oh, maybe, oh, Habakkuk, sorry. Habakkuk 2 for sorry So behold his soul is puffed up. It is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith This is what Paul is getting that from and then again in Galatians 3 11 It says now is that the next one babes? Oh, Hebrews 10, 38, sorry. It says, but my righteous one shall live by faith. And if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. So the righteous one, the one who is righteous in God, lives by faith. This is what he does. In Hebrews 11, 6, he says, and without faith, it is impossible to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him. So we live by faith. That means faith is a part of our lives. We live, it's the way of life we have. Colossians 1, 22 and 23. He has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. If indeed you continue in faith, what's it look like to be continuing in the faith? Stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation under heaven and of which I, Paul, became a minister. And then again in Hebrews 3, 12 through 14, he says, take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin, for we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end." This is living in faith. So brothers and sisters, to just sum this up, the gospel that we will see, that now Paul will unpack, this is a transitional verse. these verses are, will show the power of God in salvation and the righteousness of God we will see throughout there. But as we come to the communion now, the reason that you and I sit here today is not that we were smarter than any others. It's because of the mercy and grace of God in our lives. It is because God has done the work that we could not do through Christ on the cross. You and I take the bread and the cup because God has declared you and I righteous because of the work of Christ. The gospel finds its power in the person of Christ. salvation finds its roots in the person and work of Christ righteousness likewise is rooted in the person and work of Christ Christ himself therefore is the gospel Christ is the one that is proclaimed it is the one that Paul preached so as we take the