The Gospel - The Power of God for Salvation

Good morning and thank you for joining us this first Sunday of 2022. I hope you all enjoyed a safe and happy New Year.

As we start this new year, I want to encourage each one of you to consider joining me over the next three weeks as we once again participate as a church in 21 days of prayer and fasting. Our 21 days begin tomorrow, and go until Sunday, January 23. During this time, I encourage you to fast from something, and use that fast to deepen your relationship with God and tune in to His work in your life and around you even more as we start a new year. You can choose to fast from food by skipping one meal a day, or by skipping food for a 24-hour period once a week for the next three weeks, or by giving up a specific food item like coffee, meat, or sugar. Pick something you will miss, and let that experience of missing what you’ve given up, and longing for whatever you are fasting from refocus your attention on desiring God and seeking Him with that same hunger and longing. If you don’t fast from food, consider fasting from something else that is important to you. You might fast from TV, from Social Media, or from some other activity that you enjoy. Whatever you fast from, the point isn’t just to give something up, but to refocus your time and energy on your relationship with God. Spend more time reading your Bible; pray a little longer; have times of silence where you think about God, His character, His values and plans. If you have questions about how to fast, you can join us this Wednesday night and I’ll be going deeper into how you can participate in this emphasis on prayer and fasting. And don’t forget that our studies on Hebrews and on Philippians are starting on January 12th.

At the same time that we are doing our 21 days of prayer and fasting, we are going to start a new sermon series about The Gospel. We are going to look at some basic truths about the Gospel as well as some deeper insights on how the Gospel is something that not only provides salvation, but how it should affect every aspect of our lives, encourage us, and bring us greater freedom and joy than we’ve ever experienced before.

Today we are looking at a passage in Romans chapter 1 where Paul writes to the Roman church that the Gospel is the “power of God for salvation.” If you have your Bible with you today, please turn with me to Romans 1. Today I’m reading out of the NIV translation.

Romans 1:16–25 NIV

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. 17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.” 18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. 24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

Let’s pray...

Let me start this morning with a statement that should not be controversial or divisive or surprising to anyone who is a Christian.

THE GOSPEL

The Gospel should be the foundation of everything we do as a Church. Everything we do should be in service to the Gospel and should support our mission to spread the Gospel.

The Old Testament tells the story of how God set the stage for the Gospel to be revealed, for humanity to understand our need of the gospel, and for us to be able to interpret the gospel rightly. The life of Jesus and His teaching are the Gospel revealed and accomplished, and the writings of the disciples that fill the rest of the New Testament are the Gospel applied to life.

I keep using this word, “Gospel,” but sometimes we use a word so much that it’s detail and meaning gets lost or blurred. As Christians sometimes we use words like “Gospel” assuming that everyone understands what that word means, but even among Christians it is good to remind ourselves what the Gospel is. So let’s quickly define what the Gospel is. In the most basic, simple definition, we can say that...

The Gospel is the announcement that God has reconciled us to Himself by sending His Son Jesus to die as a substitute for our sins, and that all who repent and believe have eternal life in Him.

Last Sunday I shared the verse that is probably the most famous verse from the Bible.

John 3:16 NIV

16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Let’s break our definition down quickly so that we understand it a little better.

God has reconciled us to Himself.

What does that mean?

Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible Reconciliation

Restoration of friendly relationships and of peace where before there had been hostility and alienation. Ordinarily it also includes the removal of the offense which caused the disruption of peace and harmony.

According to the Bible, lost humanity isn’t just distant from God because of sin, it is God’s enemy.

Romans 5:10 NIV

10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!

When Jesus sent His Son Jesus to die for our sins, He did all that was necessary for people to go from being God’s enemies to being His children. Jesus’s death didn’t just cause God to ignore our sin, it completely removed our sin, our offense that caused enmity between us and God.

Shannon and I love fresh fruit. In fact, one of the first things we did when we bought our house a year and a half ago was to order some fruit trees and plant them in our yard. We planted peaches, apricots, nectarines, apples, figs, pomegranates, tangerines, persimmons, kiwi vines and grape vines, and more. In order to help the tree put down good roots and grow strong, you are supposed to remove the fruit that grows the first two or three years you plant a tree so that the tree puts its energy into growing strong, but this past year Shannon allowed one of our tangerines to grow just three tangerines, just so we could have a small taste of what we are looking forward to in the years to come. Imagine if that fruit had been infested by bugs, if it had rotten, and gone bad, but Shannon picked them and said, “Just pretend it’s good.” We could have pretended, but it would not have been good. Jesus didn’t just ask God the Father to pretend we don’t owe Him anything for our sin, He didn’t ask the Father to pretend we were clean and sinless. He paid for our sin and REMOVED our sin so that when we stand before Him we are completely whole and blameless, and God doesn’t have to pretend we are on good terms, we actually ARE on good terms.

Our definition also says that...

Jesus’s death was a substitute for our sins.

According to divine law, each person has a debt that has to be paid because everyone has sinned. The payment of that debt is death. But Jesus offers to pay for our sins by His death if we will put our faith in Him and let Him do that for us. That’s how we are able to stand before the Father completely blameless. However, the way that we receive Christ’s payment requires us to take action. Not action that earns us forgiveness, but action that accepts His gift of forgiveness. First...

We must repent of our sins.

We have to acknowledge that we need forgiveness, that the things God calls sin really are sin. But repentance is more than just saying something is true. Repenting means that we turn away from the sins of our past. That we change the direction of our lives, with God’s help, and turn to Him instead. Second...

We must believe in Jesus.

Believing in Jesus also is more than just a mental exercise. True belief like what the Bible teaches we have to have in Jesus, means that we believe that what Jesus says and teaches is true, and that we then apply it to our lives and obey His word. Saying we believe in Jesus but not letting His words change our lives so that we are living like He asks us to live is hypocrisy.

It is when we repent and believe that we receive Christ’s forgiveness and our relationship with God is reconciled, it is then that we have the guarantee of eternal life.

This is a brief and basic definition of the Gospel. So let’s look at todays’ passage in light of what the Gospel is...

The Gospel brings salvation to everyone who believes, no matter their background.

Paul’s ministry as he traveled throughout the Roman world took place both among the Jewish communities in the cities he visited and among the Gentiles who also became followers of Jesus. For many of the Jewish people scattered throughout the cities that Paul started churches in, it was a new and challenging concept that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob also wanted to offer the gift of salvation to non-Jews. One of the challenges that the early church had to work through was that they had to learn to live with and love people who were different from them. Jews and Gentiles had hugely different cultures, from what they ate, to how they talked, to the way they dressed, to different life experiences based on their cultures, and so much more. But no matter their background, the Gospel was the glue that united them and brought them all salvation. Their differences did not disappear, but their common faith was stronger than the things that divided them. It wasn’t always easy, but obeying God and living how He wants us to live, which includes living in unity and love with one another, was what Christ had called them to do. It is what God calls US to do.

Church, my goal as your pastor is to lead our church to reflect the biblical model and ideal of what God wants us to be as much as possible. I want for everyone who comes to this church to experience church as God intended it to be. I don’t think there is any church that has figured out how to do this perfectly, and so we are a work in progress, just like all the other churches around us. Still, I desire for us to grow so in love with God, and become so passionate about bringing Him glory and being a part of what He is doing, that we are constantly doing whatever we need to do to be more and more like the Church Christ calls us to be. I want the light of Christ that shines out of this family of faith to be so attractive that it draws people to God. And when people are drawn to God, people from all different backgrounds, we become a better reflection of that ideal that we are called to. It’s not easy, it’s not always comfortable, but I believe that it is absolutely biblical and that it is what the Gospel calls us to be.

Paul goes on to write about two different kinds of righteousness: God’s righteousness, and the righteousness of believers. that the gospel reveals God’s righteousness.

rom 1:17

Romans 1:17 NIV

17 For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

The Gospel reveals God’s righteousness in that God brought His righteous judgment for sin. Payment was made and punishment was exacted.

God did not ignore sin and did not let it go unpunished. God’s perfection and holiness and righteousness demands that He not ignore sin. There must be payment for sin. There must be punishment because otherwise justice would not be met.

For believers, payment was made by Jesus, and punishment fell on Him at the cross. This is the good news that we call the Gospel.

In the Gospel, Jesus pays for the sins of those who put their faith in Him, so righteousness has been maintained, and at the same time grace and mercy has been extended to humanity. Paul mentions this second righteousness and emphasizes that our human righteousness as believers is by faith and will always be by faith.

Believers’ righteousness is by faith alone when it is received, and continues to be by faith alone throughout our lives.

In other words, the Gospel isn’t just how we are saved, it’s how we live our entire lives as followers of Jesus. We don’t receive salvation by faith and then have to work to keep our salvation by our works. Too many Christians go through life worried that they have to pray to receive Christ again and again whenever they mess up, when they feel they have failed God because of some grievous sin in their lives. But one of the blessings of the Gospel is that our righteousness is by faith from first to last. We believe that once you are saved you are always saved. That’s called the assurance of salvation. You can rest in the knowledge that just like faith saved you, faith keeps you righteous, even when our actions fail us. This doesn’t mean we can just go crazy and start living some sinful lifestyle because we have faith. True faith and true love for Christ should motivate us to continue down the path of spiritual growth and maturity. Yes, there may be times or seasons of rebellion, but a true child of God experiences their Father’s discipline and love and does not continue in rebellion. A follower of Jesus will experience times of growth and times of stagnation, hopefully more often of growth, but someone who has experienced very little or no growth, and whose life looks just like the life of an unbeliever must really ask themselves if they have true life-giving faith, or if they just made a mental or emotional decision to say a prayer at some point in their lives, but never really allowed faith to transform them. Those people will be like the people that Jesus refers to in the Gospel of Matthew...

Matthew 7:21–23 NIV

21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’

So our righteousness is by faith from the moment we are saved and as we live life in obedience to Christ. “the righteous will live by faith,” Paul concludes. Not by hard work, not by following the Law of Moses.

Paul then goes on to argue and show that...

All people in every part of the world stand condemned to suffer God’s wrath because of their sin and rebellion against what is evident to them about God through His general revelation in nature.

One question that people often ask is, “What about the poor man or woman on a remote island in the middle of nowhere that has never had a chance to hear about Jesus… will God condemn them too if they never had a chance?”

Paul’s answer to this question is clear.

Romans 1:20 NIV

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

That includes the person who grew up in America, surrounded by churches and access to the Gospel, and also the person living in a remote village that has never had the chance to hear about Jesus. God has made the truth about Himself plain to every civilization and people. Unfortunately, they have ignored or corrupted their knowledge of God, often over hundreds of years and for many generations, but they are still accountable for their sin and rebellion. This is why Jesus gave the task to His disciples to “Go to every nation and make disciples.” There is NO OTHER way for people to be saved. There isn’t a lesser hell for those who never heard, and a worse hell for those who knew about Jesus and rejected Him. There isn’t an in-between place, a “Purgatory” where people suffer for a limited amount of time until they make up for their sin and then get to go to heaven.

The ONLY way to salvation and eternal life is through faith in Jesus.

This is why we take up the Lottie Moon offering every year to help support missionaries who go to these remote places where no one has heard about Jesus so that those people have a chance to know Christ, put their faith in Him, and receive forgiveness and eternal life. The devil has been waging a spiritual war on earth against God, deceiving people and leading them to worship other things instead of the One True God. People have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and this is why God gave His people the task to take the truth to those who have been deceived.

This is why one of my goals this year is for us to offer training on how to share your faith with others, because every person who is a disciple of Jesus is commanded to go and make disciples. That is one of the jobs of the church, to help you become disciples who make more disciples.

This is why the Gospel needs to be central to everything we do as a church, because it is the ONLY way for people to be saved and to have a restored relationship with God. The Gospel is God’s love letter to humanity. It is His solution to our need for forgiveness and salvation. Over the next several weeks we will also learn how the Gospel is the solution for all the other needs in our lives. Our need for love, acceptance, purpose, happiness, peace, hope, and so much more is met in one way or another by the Gospel.

This morning we are going to take part in the Lord’s Supper, or Communion. If you have been with us before during a Communion celebration, you know that we welcome everyone to participate who has taken that step of faith to trust in Jesus, to repent and to believe in Him. If you have not made that important decision yet, I want to encourage you to simply observe and not participate for now. You should have received a communion kit as you arrived today. It is a small cup with a little wafer that we will use to take communion...

Communion

1 Corinthians 11:23–26 CSB

23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.

Let’s pray...

As our service comes to an end, I don’t want to skip over the important time when you have an opportunity to respond to God’s activity in your life. If you have never made that decision to trust in Jesus to forgive you, to make Him your Lord, then I urge you to take that step today.

If you have already taken that step, but feel that God is calling you to take a different step of obedience, or you feel you need prayer for some situation in your life, I encourage you to come forward at this time.

While we sing our song of invitation, I encourage you to respond to God’s activity in your life...

Let’s pray...

Hebrews 13:20–21 CSB

20 Now may the God of peace, who brought up from the dead our Lord Jesus—the great Shepherd of the sheep—through the blood of the everlasting covenant, 21 equip you with everything good to do his will, working in us what is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.