SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Matt.
SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning.
SPEAKER_00: We are continuing our study through the book of Romans.
SPEAKER_00: We're just beginning the study.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to be studying Romans for a while, probably a year and a half or so breaking for seasons of Advent and Lent.
SPEAKER_00: We're just going to take it passage by passage.
SPEAKER_00: So this morning we have two verses as we open the book of Romans.
SPEAKER_00: Now we can remember that Rome was the greatest city in the ancient world.
SPEAKER_00: Rome was wealthy, it was powerful.
SPEAKER_00: Rome was sophisticated, and yet it was deeply broken.
SPEAKER_00: This letter that Paul writes to the church in Rome is Paul's theological masterpiece.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 1, 16 and 17.
SPEAKER_00: 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.
SPEAKER_00: For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
SPEAKER_00: So we have five points to work our way through these two verses.
SPEAKER_00: Point number one, our salvation, so our acceptance with God does not come by our power, but by God's power.
SPEAKER_00: So what this means is it means that you are not loved by God because you are lovely or you are lovable or you're becoming more lovely or better or good.
SPEAKER_00: You're loved by God because he chooses to love you.
SPEAKER_00: It's not based on your performance or your resume.
SPEAKER_00: It's based on his resume, his choice to love you.
SPEAKER_00: Paul repeats this message in 1 Corinthians 1.18, for the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.
SPEAKER_00: There, that word is again power.
SPEAKER_00: So that word power is the Greek word dynamis, meaning power, might, ability, capacity, or effective force.
SPEAKER_00: You're smart people, you already figured out.
SPEAKER_00: We get the word dynamite from this word.
SPEAKER_00: Dynamite's something that comes in a very small package and it can create enormous effective force.
SPEAKER_00: A hundred years ago, when Mount Rushmore was built, 14 years it took, these guys built Mount Rushmore by blowing 450,000 tons of granite off the side of a mountain using dynamite.
SPEAKER_00: A stick of dynamite doesn't look powerful.
SPEAKER_00: It's relatively small.
SPEAKER_00: It's ordinary looking, but it is powerful.
SPEAKER_00: It holds enormous force.
SPEAKER_00: This is what Paul's saying.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel is not just instruction, it is intervening power.
SPEAKER_00: It actually holds a force, effective force.
SPEAKER_00: And the mechanism for that power is grace.
SPEAKER_00: God's one-way love to you is the mechanism of the power.
SPEAKER_00: That grace comes toward you without you causing it by anything from yourself.
SPEAKER_00: It's unmerited, undeserved, one-way love to you.
SPEAKER_00: That's where the power is.
SPEAKER_00: See, religion says, change and you can be loved.
SPEAKER_00: Gospel says you're already loved in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: One way, now you can change.
SPEAKER_00: And that's good news because it takes the pressure off of us to start the relationship with God, but also to maintain the relationship with God because it is by God's choosing that we're in the relationship.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to save yourself.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to become more lovely to be loved by God.
SPEAKER_00: You're already loved in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That's the effective force.
SPEAKER_00: And it changes us from the inside out.
SPEAKER_00: And we receive it.
SPEAKER_00: The verse says that it is the power to salvation.
SPEAKER_00: That word salvation, it means all of God's work in us to forgive us, to deem us righteous, to welcome us into relationship with Him here and when we die.
SPEAKER_00: All of that work, that's a lot of work.
SPEAKER_00: All of it has nothing to do with your record, your resume, your performance.
SPEAKER_00: It is God's gift to you.
SPEAKER_00: One way.
SPEAKER_00: We know it in the cross.
SPEAKER_00: That's where we see it objectively in history, that our sin is put upon Jesus on the cross and his righteousness is given to us.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 5, 8, and 9, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, so still messy, still broken, we don't have our acts together.
SPEAKER_00: Christ died for us.
SPEAKER_00: Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now you may ask, okay, so the gospel is the power of God, the mechanism is God's grace to us, the one-way love of God.
SPEAKER_00: We know it in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: What about the Holy Spirit?
SPEAKER_00: Russ, why aren't you talking about the Holy Spirit?
SPEAKER_00: I know you were asking that.
SPEAKER_00: You're so theological.
SPEAKER_00: You were asking, okay, great.
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad you asked.
SPEAKER_00: Glad you asked.
SPEAKER_00: Years ago, I was weeding in my backyard.
SPEAKER_00: We had a big oak tree in the backyard.
SPEAKER_00: The tree's not there anymore, but at the time, big oak tree.
SPEAKER_00: We had English ivy around it, had some hostas around it, a little shade garden.
SPEAKER_00: So I couldn't spray weeds in that area.
SPEAKER_00: I had to go through and pull them one by one.
SPEAKER_00: About once a month, I'd have to go through that area, pull the weeds.
SPEAKER_00: So I start pulling and I'm pulling, I'm working my way around the tree.
SPEAKER_00: Looking back, it's looking so good.
SPEAKER_00: I'm so pleased with myself.
SPEAKER_00: And I pulled this one weed, and as soon as I pull it, I feel a sting right on my neck.
SPEAKER_00: And then I felt a sting kind of right here on my leg.
SPEAKER_00: And then just a swarm comes up.
unknown: Right?
SPEAKER_00: Georgia Tech fans, y'all that's the only time I'm gonna give.
SPEAKER_00: It's the only Georgia Tech shout-out I'll ever give.
SPEAKER_00: Swarm comes up.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I take off down the driveway, down the street, right?
SPEAKER_00: About 10 yellow jacket stings later, I'm back in the house.
SPEAKER_00: My sweet wife, you know, oh, oh, you're so tough.
SPEAKER_00: You're not even crazy, you're so manly.
SPEAKER_00: So she takes some anti-sting medicine and she applies it to the to the stings.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the point the medicine is the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: My wife is the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Now she's gonna love that illustration.
SPEAKER_00: But in the illustration, she's the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: She's applying the medicine, the power.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit applies the gospel to our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit is the person of God that applies the one-way love of God known to us in Christ and His work in the message of the gospel to our needy hearts.
SPEAKER_00: See, aren't you glad that you asked for the Holy Spirit?
SPEAKER_00: That the Holy Spirit's applying the medicine.
SPEAKER_00: Applying the medicine.
SPEAKER_00: Point number two, the gospel is for every person, which includes the beautiful and the broken.
SPEAKER_00: The truth is we're all beautiful and we're all broken and we're this at the same time.
SPEAKER_00: Last Sunday we took our oldest to college for the first time.
SPEAKER_00: We packed her up and packed up two SUVs full to move her into her dorm room.
SPEAKER_00: We had everything in crates and bags and got it all loaded up early Sunday morning.
SPEAKER_00: We drove the University of Georgia to the parking lot at Brumby Dorm and we start to unload.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm looking around and we got all these SUVs and trucks and we're all unloading.
SPEAKER_00: And every other dad in midlife, we all look exactly the same.
SPEAKER_00: We got on our khaki shorts, a golf shirt.
SPEAKER_00: We've been somewhere, we're special.
SPEAKER_00: We got our sunglasses around our neck.
SPEAKER_00: We all look exactly the same.
SPEAKER_00: Every girl looks about the same.
SPEAKER_00: They're all wearing about different colors, the same Lulu outfit.
SPEAKER_00: They're all looking, we're all looking about the same.
SPEAKER_00: We're checking each other out a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: We're working and sweating, loading and unloading, but but we're kind of checking each other.
SPEAKER_00: Like, who are you?
SPEAKER_00: Where are you from?
SPEAKER_00: And we're checking it out.
SPEAKER_00: A matte finished defender pulled up.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we were like, what's up?
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, who are you?
SPEAKER_00: You know, it was like, I was like, I like your truck, man.
SPEAKER_00: I gave him a little nod.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we had a we had a Georgia football coach on our hall.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, big deal.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: We're all status signaling.
SPEAKER_00: Status signaling and sorting.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe your status signaling by not status signaling, you're like, oh, I don't do that.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's your status signaling.
SPEAKER_00: We've sorted you.
SPEAKER_00: It's just the human way of justifying our value in front of other people.
SPEAKER_00: And then if we're worldly, we give and withhold love based on our conclusions.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus does none of that.
SPEAKER_00: Not a bit.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel does none of that.
SPEAKER_00: God's one-way love is absolute to all people.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we read this verse and we go, oh, to the Jew and the Greek, but to a Jewish, a Jewish person in Rome at the time, blow their mind.
SPEAKER_00: God's love is to all people, all socioeconomic levels, races.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, even different college football fan bases.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's that, it's that wild, wild love.
SPEAKER_00: It's absolute in its offering, and then it's personal in its reception, right?
SPEAKER_00: For it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.
SPEAKER_00: So there's a personal reception of it.
SPEAKER_00: Let's jump to verse 17.
SPEAKER_00: For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith, for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
SPEAKER_00: Point number three is this the gospel reveals God's righteousness to unrighteous people like you and me.
SPEAKER_00: The question underneath Romans, this theological question that's going to play out, he's going to theologically argue this for chapters.
SPEAKER_00: How can a holy and righteous God justify sinful people without compromising his own righteousness?
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't God get dirty in the process?
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't it make him unrighteous to just give out this love so freely?
SPEAKER_00: Romans 3, 21 through 26.
SPEAKER_00: But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it.
SPEAKER_00: 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, whom God put forth as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.
SPEAKER_00: This was to show God's righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins.
SPEAKER_00: It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: So God remains fully just while also being the justifier who can love and be gracious to sinners because Jesus paid that price that we should have paid.
SPEAKER_00: Meaning that you can be imperfect and broken and messy.
SPEAKER_00: You can be a great Christian, you'll be a horrible Christian.
SPEAKER_00: And in Jesus, you're fully righteous.
SPEAKER_00: Point number four, we become righteous not by our giving, but by our receiving.
SPEAKER_00: Now we call this receiving faith.
SPEAKER_00: Paul's going to hammer this home for us in chapter four.
SPEAKER_00: Here's a taste of it, Romans 4, 5.
SPEAKER_00: And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: This past Father's Day, I received one of the best gifts I've ever got.
SPEAKER_00: What a huge gift.
SPEAKER_00: It was a little gift about this big.
SPEAKER_00: It's called turtle box.
SPEAKER_00: Anyone else got a turtle box?
SPEAKER_00: I didn't know I needed this.
SPEAKER_00: Apparently it did.
SPEAKER_00: Thought I had all the speakers you could ever need in your life.
SPEAKER_00: But I get this for Father's Day.
SPEAKER_00: A turtle box is this little speaker.
SPEAKER_00: It's little, it's loud, super clear, it's waterproof.
SPEAKER_00: Mine has initials on it.
SPEAKER_00: Thought that was kind of cool.
SPEAKER_00: Love that.
SPEAKER_00: I've been taking it with me everywhere I go.
SPEAKER_00: If I go on a trip, I pack it, go to the lake, I take it, back porch.
SPEAKER_00: It's just always with me.
SPEAKER_00: Dave Matthews Band has never sounded better.
SPEAKER_00: It has sounded so good.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what a gift, an amazing gift.
SPEAKER_00: Didn't know I needed it.
SPEAKER_00: It came to me.
SPEAKER_00: The gift came at me and I received it.
SPEAKER_00: Me implementing it into my life is the act of receiving, which we could call faith.
SPEAKER_00: The gift has changed my life as I've received it.
SPEAKER_00: That's what good gifts do.
SPEAKER_00: That's faith.
SPEAKER_00: Receiving the gift from outside of me, letting it be implemented into my life.
SPEAKER_00: That's point number five.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel produces new life in us and through us.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we read in verse 17.
SPEAKER_00: For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.
SPEAKER_00: Paul's quoting Habakkuk 2.4.
SPEAKER_00: He's showing that this principle of faith is not new.
SPEAKER_00: This Christian religion didn't invent it, that the Jewish people were still living by faith.
SPEAKER_00: But Paul is developing this idea further in Romans that we're putting faith in Jesus for all the work that we need done for us.
SPEAKER_00: Theologically, we could say it this way.
SPEAKER_00: We have security.
SPEAKER_00: We'd call that theologically the security of the saints, granting us assurance of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: Security of the saints granting us assurance of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: We are secure with God, not based on anything we do, but by the gift, which gives us assurance of salvation, which means that we don't have to be anxious and insecure on a day that you may be with all sorts of parts of your life, just not with God.
SPEAKER_00: Isn't that relieving?
SPEAKER_00: That at least that part of your life can be relieved.
SPEAKER_00: You can be anxious about all sorts of things, but we don't have to be anxious and insecure about our relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: This is why theology matters.
SPEAKER_00: It's because I could send you out of here making you more anxious and more insecure if I give you a message like half Jesus, half your own work.
SPEAKER_00: But when Jesus is the full sufficiency of your relationship with God, your whole life is just coming from the overflow of this gratitude and security and assurance.
SPEAKER_00: This is the lived experience of that theology.
SPEAKER_00: We are justified and saved by grace, God's power, through faith, our response.
SPEAKER_00: So we do not have to be anxious and insecure with our faith, not in our faith.
SPEAKER_00: Other things, sure, sure, me too, but not our faith.
SPEAKER_00: Because it is not faith in our own faith.
SPEAKER_00: Meaning, you don't have faith in your uh list of Christian to-do things to do.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have faith in your Sunday attendance, you don't have faith in your quiet times, your devotion.
SPEAKER_00: All that is expressions of your faith.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have faith in your own faith.
SPEAKER_00: You have faith in God's power, the effective force.
SPEAKER_00: And we live by that faith.
SPEAKER_00: And that root that's in you, that gift, it begins to be expressed outward.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not a perfect performative life, but it's a Christian life of humility, graciousness, confession, gratitude, love, obedience, more confession, more mistakes, more confession.
SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite movies is The Truman Show.
SPEAKER_00: Remember those were 30 years ago or so?
SPEAKER_00: Jim Carrey was in this movie, and his whole life, he unknowingly is living inside of a TV set.
SPEAKER_00: It's a TV show.
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't know it.
SPEAKER_00: He's like a grown man, but his entire life, everything around him, is one massive town inside of a TV set.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody he knows, everything he sees, they're all in on it except him.
SPEAKER_00: And he gradually discovers this truth to be to break free.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the scene, the first time the truth breaks through.
SPEAKER_00: Let's watch this.
SPEAKER_01: Don't forget to buckle up out there on Radio Land.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, what did Truman need?
SPEAKER_00: Well, he needed a breakthrough.
SPEAKER_00: He didn't even know how bound he was until he had an outside word breakthrough.
SPEAKER_00: The radio gives a message and then it changes everything else.
SPEAKER_00: You should go watch the movie.
SPEAKER_00: Great movie.
SPEAKER_00: From this point on, everything changes because of an outside word.
SPEAKER_00: The truth intervenes, it finds him, and then has the power to create a change.
SPEAKER_00: Truman needs to be set free, didn't even know it.
SPEAKER_00: We need to be set free.
SPEAKER_00: Often we don't even know it because we're bound by our own sin and selfishness.
SPEAKER_00: We need the outside word of grace to come to us that we can be loved even while we're sinners.
SPEAKER_00: And we don't have to earn it.
SPEAKER_00: We receive it in the gift of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: This is sort of what Paul's saying in Romans that this gospel is dynamite, it's effective force, it's a power, but it's only gonna have power as an outside word being spoken to you into your heart.
SPEAKER_00: Outside love coming to you unmerited.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we know in the cross.
SPEAKER_00: That's why our hope for you in our church is that you leave each week more enamored of Jesus and not so much just thinking about the Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: Meaning, if you're more enamored by Jesus and how good he is for you, your Christian life's gonna be an expression of that.
SPEAKER_00: But if we just give you what to do, how to live, five ways to get better, you could leave here and slowly get sort of like half Jesus, half my performance.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not the theology of Paul.
SPEAKER_00: The theology of Paul is that the entire effective force of your relationship secure with God and any change that you have fruit in your life, obedience, it will become, it will be out of the root of Jesus in you.
SPEAKER_00: He is the effective force.
SPEAKER_00: If you have any questions about the sermon, need prayer, I'll be down front afterward.
SPEAKER_00: Love to pray with you.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray together.
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we're so thankful we're not left on our own, bound and powerless, just staring at ourselves, trying to get ourselves better, all the while recognizing we don't really have our acts that that together.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, I'm the first to say that I don't have my act together.
SPEAKER_00: When it comes to thoughts and motives and Lord, I am in need of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, as a church, we come before you and we say that we are in need of Jesus for the forgiveness of our sins.
SPEAKER_00: We are in need of Jesus for our righteousness.
SPEAKER_00: Help us all the more to be more enamored by your unmerited love to us than our performance in front of you.
SPEAKER_00: And would our hearts be changed.
SPEAKER_00: Would we have more gratitude?
SPEAKER_00: Would we have more empowerment to want to obey you, follow you, live for you, love others?
SPEAKER_00: And would all this come because we are casting our gaze upon Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We pray this in Christ's name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.