Word of Salvation – Vol.38 No.05 – February 1993
The Gospel Of Righteousness By Faith
Sermon by Rev. John Haverland on Romans 1:16-17
Reading: Philip.3:1-11, Romans 1:1-17.
Beloved congregation,
I am sure we have all been asked, at some time or other, what church we belong to. When we explain that we are members of the Reformed Church we sometimes get the response, ‘Never heard of it..!’ This may prompt other questions about what our church believes and what it teaches.
At times we may be a little defensive about our churches and even perhaps ashamed of our Christian faith, especially since ours is a minority view in both the wider church and in our society today. However, we need not be ashamed to be Christian or to be Reformed, because this is the biblical faith, it is the gospel.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, a famous Baptist preacher of last century, makes this very point:
‘I have my own private opinion that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and Him crucified, unless we preach what is nowadays called Calvinism. It is a nickname to call it Calvinism; Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else.’
(C.H Spurgeon, ‘The Early Years’, ch.13, p.168.)
The Apostle Paul was not ashamed of the gospel either. He knew that it was from God; that it was the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.
He too may have been tempted to be ashamed of this gospel, especially writing as he was to Jews and Gentiles in Rome.
The Jews despised the Christian gospel. They expected a Messiah who was going to be a great king, a ruler, not one who would be hung on an accursed cross.
The Romans also ridiculed the gospel. To them the cross was an instrument of torture and execution for criminals. How could people glory in a man who had been put to death in this way?
Paul had been planning to visit the Christians in Rome for some time, but hadn’t yet made it. Some may have thought he was avoiding them because he was embarrassed by this message about the cross, especially in Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire.
Paul confirmed that he had planned to visit them, but explained that up till now he had been prevented from doing that. But this wasn’t because he was reluctant to come to Rome. Nor was it because he was ashamed of this gospel.
No, he was proud of it, because it was the gospel. The word ‘gospel’ means good news. It refers to the good news about Jesus – his dying and rising. Paul gloried and rejoiced in this Jesus, his Lord and his Saviour!
He was also proud of it because it demonstrated the power of God. Remember that he was writing to Christians in Rome, the centre of the Roman Empire, which was the most powerful Empire the world had yet seen. The Roman armies had conquered the world by brute force and disciplined might. But Paul knew that the gospel was more powerful than Rome. He knew that it had the power to change people from the inside. It had the power to transform lives for the present and for eternity. This was more than any Roman army could do.
And he was proud of the gospel because it was the power of God for salvation. The word salvation means wholeness or wellness. It is a broad term that refers to all that God has done and will do for his people.
It was appropriate that Paul should use this word here because these two verses sum up the whole message of this letter to the Romans. This is his theme. The gospel of salvation – that people are saved by a righteousness from God received through faith. God makes people right with Himself through faith in Christ. This is the gospel that we want to examine together.
We want to look at…
1. Its Recipients
2. Its Righteousness
3. Its Requirement.
- Its Recipients.
Who was this gospel for? Who was to receive it?
Well, it was aimed first at the Jew and then at the Gentile.
It was addressed to the Jew first because they had been God’s people for many centuries. From the call of Abraham until the coming of Christ, some 2,000 years, God had spoken to them. Jesus had commanded His disciples to take this message to them before anyone else. They had the privilege of hearing it first.
When they rejected it, Paul took it to the Gentiles. He continued to preach to the Jews but he also preached this message to others. It wasn’t long before the gospel had touched every corner of the known world.
The Jews had a great struggle with this, even the Jewish Christians. After 20 centuries of history they found it hard to accept that God was also including the Gentiles. But He was.
This is true today too. The gospel is for everyone, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, the simple and the intelligent, the labourer and the professional.
We know this in our heads, but I wonder if we always translate this into practice. We sometimes find it hard to imagine the gospel making an impact on other groups of people, people who are very different from us, different socially or economically or morally. Yet the good news of God’s salvation is for all, for everyone, regardless of employment or race or background.
- Its Righteousness
This word focuses our attention on one of the great questions of this letter: ‘How can I get right with God? How can I be righteous before Him?’
This was the problem that Martin Luther agonized over in the early 16th century. He thought he had to establish his own righteousness before God, that somehow he had to make himself right with Him.
That’s what he tried to do. He lay in cold stone rooms with hardly anything on. He starved himself of food and sleep and luxuries. He tried to follow every monastic discipline he could think of to achieve this righteousness, so much so that he even exasperated the abbot who was over him. But try as he might he could not find this peace with God.
Luther was a professor in the University of Wittenberg and he was lecturing on Romans. One day as he studied these verses he realised that this righteousness did not come from himself, but it came from God! It was not something he had to earn; no, it was a gift – a gift from God!
It was this biblical truth that prompted him to begin to question the way the church of his day understood the gospel. As he did so he found the whole Roman Catholic system of theology begin to unravel. It came apart because it was not the gospel of salvation.
The Roman Catholic faith was built on an elaborate and complicated system of works righteousness. You had to do certain things, certain good works, to gain salvation.
Luther came to understand that we cannot earn a right relationship with God. It is something God gives us.
This same truth had been revealed to Paul many centuries before. He had tried to gain a righteousness before God by keeping the law. But looking back he considered it all rubbish. ‘I consider them rubbish 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 is through faith in Christ.’ (Philip.3:8-9).
This righteousness is given to us on the basis of what Jesus has done for us. Jesus took our sin on Himself, and He died in our place on the cross, giving us His righteousness. So when God looks at us He no longer sees our sin but He sees us clothed with the righteousness of Christ. This isn’t our work, it is His work.
How we need to be reminded of this truth. It is central to the whole Bible, but we forget it or we doubt it. All of us have this feeling deep inside that we need to be good enough, that we need to do something; that it must somehow be up to us in some way. But the gospel is a message about a righteousness from God given to us because of what Jesus has done.
We sang of this earlier in the service:
‘Not what my hands have done,
Can save my guilty soul.
Not what my toiling flesh has borne,
Can make my spirit whole.
Not what I feel or do,
Can give me peace with God,
Not all my prayers and sighs and tears
Can bear this awful load.’
‘Thy grace alone O Christ,
To me can pardon speak,
Thy power alone O Son of God,
Can this sore bondage break.
No other work save thine.
No other blood will do.
No strength save that which is divine,
Can bear me safely through.’
The catechism, although less poetic, also puts this well: ‘God grants and credits to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness and holiness of Christ, as if I had never sinned or been a sinner, as if I had been as perfectly obedient as Christ was obedient for me.’ (Q. 60).
This is a righteousness from God; the state of being right with God. He has arranged this for us, and He gives it to us. This is the righteousness of the gospel.
- Its Requirement
This righteousness becomes ours through faith. Faith is not the basis of our salvation. It isn’t the ground of our righteousness. It isn’t the cause of our justification. No, salvation is based in the cross of Christ. Faith, rather, is the means by which we receive the righteousness Christ has won for us in his death. It is the instrument by which we gain this righteousness. It is the empty hand stretched out to receive what God offers.
This faith is presented in the Bible as a gift of God to the sinner. It is something God gives us. He enables us to believe, to respond. He works with His Spirit in our hearts to make it possible for us to reach out to Him.
But faith is also presented in the Bible as something we must do. We are commanded, exhorted, urged to believe. The gospel is the power of God for the salvation of those who believe.
To believe, or to have faith, is to know what the Bible says about God the Father and His Son. But it is also to trust in the Lord Jesus, to depend on Him, to rest on Him. Faith is to build your life on and around your relationship with Jesus. It is to live with Him and for Him. It is to know and love Him as Saviour and Lord.
It is through this faith that God brings us into the Christian life. Not through our good works, our goodness, our effort. No, we are given the righteousness of God as we receive it in faith. This is the gospel. A gospel, a good news that Paul was not ashamed of, not even when addressing Christians living in Rome.
It is a gospel we need not be ashamed of, in a pagan and secular society. No, we have reason to be proud of this gospel, this good news of what God has done in Christ, for it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.
It was this gospel that prompted Charles Wesley to wish he had a thousand tongues to sing the praise of this great redeemer:
‘O for a thousand tongues to sing My great redeemer’s praise;
The glories of my God and king, The triumphs of His grace!’
AMEN