"I Believe in the Gospel" sermon notes

INTRODUCTION: THE KEYNOTE OF ROMANS

Not all of the books of the Bible are equally significant. Although every book of the Bible provides us with invaluable teaching, some books of the Bible establish a foundation that other books of the Bible build upon. Genesis 1-3 provides presupposition about God, humanity and the world that the entire Bible is built upon. Deuteronomy, the giving of the Law, provides the foundation upon which the Prophets built. In the New Testament, there is no writing that does more to fully explain Christianity with all its implications than the book of Romans. So we have just read from what is arguably the most important book of the New Testament. (John’s Gospel would be a close second.)

In the two verses I just read to you, Paul has given us the master theme of the greatest book. And the keynote of Romans is undoubtedly the message of the gospel itself.

NOT ASHAMED

Paul begins his keynote statement with something rather curious. He says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” Notice how he put that. He didn’t say, I’m proud of the gospel, though he certainly was. He didn’t say, I glory in the gospel, though he certainly did do that too. He said, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel.” This way of speaking in the negative is called a litotes. I heard Sinclair Ferguson say once that Scottish people are much more subdued and reserved than Americans. So if you ask an American how they’re doing, they’ll says, “Great!”. But if you ask a Scotch how they’re doing, they’ll answer, “Not bad.” That’s a litotes.

Why does Paul put it this way? Well, the obvious implication is that it is possible for Paul to somehow be ashamed of the gospel. And it is possible for you and I to be ashamed of the Gospel. But in what way? How? Note that question. Hang on to that question, because we are going to come back to it.

IT IS THE POWER OF GOD

Then Paul goes on to say, “I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation.”

Now read those words carefully. Paul does not say that the gospel is one of many ways to describe the power of God. He doesn’t say that the gospel is one way of acquiring the power of God. He doesn’t say that the Gospel is just one way to enter into the power of God. He says something remarkable. He says something here in the keynote to perhaps the most important book of the Bible that is absolutely breathtaking: the gospel IS the power of God for salvation.

The good news of the gospel is the power of God for salvation because it is the message of grace-based acceptance. God in the person of Jesus Christ pays the price for my sin. He does this not based on my merit, performance or obedience. He does this out of sheer grace. Jesus lived the life I should have lived. Jesus died the death I should have died. Jesus did this in our place, as our substitute. And we are reconciled to God based on merit – it’s just not my merit – it’s Jesus’ merit. Christians who trust in Christ’s merit rather than their own are given an infinitely valuable, free gift of sheer grace.

 Tim Keller (whose way of relating the gospel to moderns is very helpful to me and whose fingerprints are all over this sermon) has defined the gospel this way:

“Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God fully accomplishes salvation for us, rescuing us from judgment for sin into fellowship with him, and then restores the creation in which we can enjoy our new life together with him forever.”

It’s the very end of that definition that I think can be helpful for our thinking, and we’ll touch on that in a bit. But see the core of it: The gospel is the person and work of Jesus Christ.

I bet that if I asked 100 Christians what the gospel is, 99 of them would say this: “Believe and you will be saved.” But actually that is not the gospel. That is our appropriate response to the gospel. Belief and trust is what we do with the gospel, but it is not the gospel message itself. If you say that the gospel is believe, then you put the emphasis on what you do. But if you say that the gospel is the person and work of Jesus Christ, then you put the emphasis where it belongs: on what God does.

The gospel itself is the person and work of Jesus Christ. His incarnation, his righteous life, his substitutionary death on the cross, his victorious resurrection from the dead, his glorious ascension to the Father’s right hand to rule over His Kingdom, and his awesome second coming, when Christ the King will renew the earth in an act of final judgment and redemption.

JEW AND GENTILE

The gospel is radically different from religion. Religion says, “I obey, therefore I am accepted.” But the gospel says, “I am accepted, therefore I obey.” Religion operates on the principle of self-earned merit. The gospel operates on the principle of free grace.

Now notice that Paul says that the gospel is for different kinds of people. It is for the Jew and the Greek. Or if I could put it in modern terms, the gospel is for both the religious person and the irreligious person. It is for both the conservative moralist and the liberal relativist. And the gospel critiques both kinds of persons. And the gospel is something different than either conservative religiosity or liberal secularism.

The early church father Tertullian once said, “Just as Christ was crucified between two thieves, so this doctrine of justification is ever crucified between two opposite errors.” Tertullian meant that there were two basic false ways of thinking, each of which steals the power of God for salvation and the joy of the gospel. These two errors are very powerful, and they represent the natural tendencies of the human heart. All of us either default to one or the other, and they equally undercut the power and joy of the gospel. 

The religious moralist says that one must obey in to be saved. The moralist says that you are acceptable to God because of your attainments. Moralists tend to be conservatives (red state) and their lives are often filled very firm rules. Moralists tend to emphasize the holiness and justice of God, but have a harder time really accepting the grace and love of God. And the religious moralist lives life on the performance treadmill, working harder and harder to make sure that he attains God’s approval. And this does not always play out the conscious level of life – sometime it is an unconscious motivation that drives the religious person.

Now the problem with the moralistic religious person is that either they will eventually fall into one of two conditions: a) self-hatred because they can’t live up to the standards, or b) self-inflation, because they think they have lived up to the standards. Ironically, both the inferiority complex and the superiority complex have common rootage: they both believe that I must obey in order to be accepted. Moralistic people are often deeply religious (often, they are evangelical Christians), but there is often no transforming joy or power in their lives. Moralistic people often compensate for this by being excessively judgmental towards others.

Now the other thief to the gospel is the permissive, secular irreligious person. Irreligious people tend to be more liberal in their outlook (blue state). They can be religious people, but often belonging to a liberal religion. On the surface, they seem more joyful and tolerant than moralistic, religious people. They believe that everyone just needs to decide what is true for them, although they usually have one or two areas in their life (often politics) where they insist upon their own high ideals of morality, such as perhaps the environment or human rights. (So even though they say that everyone has to decide for themselves what is true for them, they don’t really live consistently with this, because at some point they impose a certain kind of morality on others just like the religious person does.)

Relativists tend to see God as a loving though somewhat impersonal force in the universe. They struggle with the idea that God is holy and just. They talk a great deal about the love of God. But they do not think of themselves as sinners, and therefore God’s love costs nothing. It’s cheap love. The way they see it, a lovely God loves lovely people. Sin isn’t really in the picture and therefore the cross isn’t really necessary and personal repentance and faith isn’t really necessary. The irreligious person says, “Of course God is going to accept me because there’s nothing wrong with me and God is so welcoming.” Perhaps the viewpoint of the relativistic irreligious person can be best summed up by the French philosopher Voltaire who famously said on his deathbed, “Of course God forgives – that’s his business.”

But the gospel’s concept of God’s love is far more rich and electrifying than this kind of bland, generic love.

Now the gospel is for both kinds of person – for the religious and the irreligious. And both kinds of people have equal need of the gospel, because both kinds of people have something critical in common. Even though they come at it from completely different ends of the spectrum, they really are the same.

They are the same in two ways: 1) Both kinds of person always avoid Jesus as a real Savior. 2) And both kinds of persons always keep control of their own lives. They both avoid Jesus as a real Savior and they keep control of their own lives. (By the way, if you want to see a picture of someone who lost complete control of his life, you should have been here last week when I baptized my fourth child, Mary Grace!)

The irreligious secularist says, “I don’t need a savior because I’m not a desperate, needy sinner to begin with.” He says, “Nobody’s going to tell me how to live my life. I will determine what is right or wrong for me, not anyone else.” So the irreligious person doesn’t need a Savior and doesn’t yield control of his life to anyone else.

The moralistic religious person seeks to be their own saviors and their own lords through religious pride. They say, “Look, I am more moral and more spiritual than other people, so God owes me. He has to listen to my prayers. I’ve performed for him, so now God owes me a happy life. I’ve earned it!” The irreligious person rejects Jesus, but the religious person uses Jesus as an example and a helper and a teacher to aid his obedience – but not really as a full-fledged Savior. You see, if you perform well enough, then your strong showing gives you a kind of leverage over God and you don’t need to fall down before in him desperate need.

Flannery O’Conner once wrote that religious people think “that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin…” If I can avoid sin, then I don’t have to give control of my life away and I don’t really have a deep, down dirty desperate need a Savior, and God will owe me happiness.

These are two different ways to do the same thing – which is to gain control over your own life.

Ironically, moralists, despite all their emphasis on traditional standards, are in the end self-centered and individualistic people because they have set themselves up as their own Savior. Relativists, despite all their emphasis on freedom and acceptance, are in the end moralistic because they still have to attain and live up to their own standards or they too will end up in despair.

So both kinds of person really avoid Jesus as Savior – the irreligious person on principle and the religious person not on principle, but in practice.

Furthermore, both the religious and the irreligious have distorted views of God. The irreligious person loses sight of the law and holiness of God, and the religious person loses sight of the love and grace of God. And in the end, they both lose the gospel entirely.

Only the gospel holds together both the holiness of God and the love of God. Without a full understanding of the holiness of God, the reality of the cross will seem unnecessary and merely symbolic. Without a full understanding of the love of God, the reality of the cross will seem distant and unreal.

The gospel is the power of God for salvation because it and it alone shows us the true horror of our sin (God’s Son crucified) while at the same showing us the exhilarating heights of his love (His death in our place, our place with him secure forever).

Christians are those who have adopted a whole new system of adopting God. They may have had both irreligious and religious phases in their lives. But they have come to see that the reason for both their religion and their irreligion was essentially the same – and essentially wrong!

Christians are those who come to see not only their sin as the problem, but they even come to see their righteous deeds as part of the problem because ultimately their good, righteous deeds were nothing but an attempt to avoid needing a real Savior and avoiding really yielding control of their lives to God.

Christians are the only people who not only repent of their sins, but they also repent of their good deeds, and they confess that it is God’s grace that supplies all their needs in Christ, not anything that they do.

I want you to see that Christianity is not fundamentally an invitation to become more religious. It’s not an invitation to become a conservative moralist. One of the difference between a moralist and a Christian is that moralists don’t repent of their righteous deeds, but Christians do.

A Christian is one who has stopped trying to gain God’s acceptance through obedience. Instead, they have repented of all their efforts to gain God’s acceptance and have laid their lives down to God and have taken Jesus Christ to be their most necessary Savior. And they trust only in his merit, not their own.

Ironically, this change in mindset (heart) actually rewires your entire motivation system. You obey because you’ve been fully, completely accepted. You become generous not stingy because God in Christ has been generous not stingy with you. You become forgiving not hard-hearted because God in Christ has been forgiving toward you. And for the rest of your life, you dive into the deep waters of the gospel.

It has been said that the gospel is simple enough to dip your toe in, but deep enough for elephants to swim in. And as you spend your life diving into the heart of the gospel, as you meditate on the blessings and glorious of this counter-intuitive, electrifying act of God, you begin to change yourself. And this change is a life-long process that involves your interaction with the gospel message.

Contrary to what some may think, we never get beyond the gospel in our Christian life to something more advanced. The gospel is not the first step in a stairway of truths. Rather, it is the hub of the wheel from which everything radiates. The gospel is not the ABC’s of Christianity, it is the A to Z of Christianity. It is everything.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that the gospel is for non-Christians, but once you become a Christian, then you revert to being a religious moralist who has to spend the rest of your life performing for God. Big mistake.

You see, the gospel isn’t just how you become a Christian, it is also how you LIVE as a Christian.

 I can tell you this, every Christian (your pastor included) at one time or another loses sight of the gospel in his life. And as a result he loses his joy. He becomes apathetic and depressed. Or angry and resentful. Or cynical or self-righteous. We become this way not because we’re not running fast enough on the performance treadmill. We become this way because we have forgotten the gospel and its full implications for our lives.

 So the application for you (Christian or not) is this: live in the Gospel. It is God’s power for your on-going salvation today. And the message for religious and irreligious alike is this: Christianity is not what you think it is. It is neither conservative or liberal. It is something altogether different.

 I told you earlier that we would come back around to Paul’s statement that he was not ashamed of the gospel. It is possible that we could be ashamed of it. We could be ashamed to admit we need a savior. We could be ashamed to give up control of our lives. We could be ashamed to admit we find the power of God for salvation not in our strength, but in our weakness. We could be ashamed of the gospel because it runs counter to the natural tendency of human nature. But the gospel doesn’t give us a spirit of fear, but rather a strange kind of new, humble confidence. To the naturally proud, the gospel brings humility. To the naturally weak, the gospel brings security.  To everyone, the gospel brings the joy of knowing God.

 The gospel is for you. It is for you today. So live in the gospel. Trinity, abandon moralism and joyless performance-oriented living. Get back in touch with your deep, desperate need of a Savior and throw yourself on Jesus. Get back in touch with that letting go of the control of your life and entrusting back to God. Plunge into the depths of the joy of the gospel. Live in a place where you can hear the grace-filled cries of Calvary. Live in a place where you can hear the stone rolling away and the Resurrected King moving to redeem the world. This is what we mean when we say that we are a gospel-centered church. This is the gospel message we live and proclaim. This is what we are about as a church. This is our mission. This is our identity. This is our purpose.

 The gospel is not good advice. It is good news. Martin Luther said, “The truth of the gospel is the principle article of all Christian doctrine… Most necessary is it that we know this article well, teach it to others, and beat it into our heads continually.” All of us, to some degree or another, still don’t “get” the gospel. None of us have moved past it. So camp out in the gospel.

 Engage in a continual re-discovery of the gospel. Pray it hot into your hearts. Read it firm into your minds. Sing it sweetly from your mouths. Read Romans. Internalize Ephesians. Consider Colossians. Gulp down Galatians. Take joy in John’s gospel. And pray it deep into your own and meditate on its truth – and keep at it until the joy returns. Turn away from self and turn in faith to the Jesus the Messiah, your Savior and Lord.