In the gospel, God powerfully calls people out of slavery to sin and sets them apart for a new life in Christ. Today, hear R.C. Sproul’s opening sermon in the book of Romans examining Paul’s Apostolic calling and the shared call of every Christian. Get R.C. Sproul’s commentary on the book of Romans for your donation of any amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3853/offer Meet Today’s Teacher: R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was known for his ability to winsomely and clearly communicate deep, practical truths from God’s Word. He was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine. Meet the Host: Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children. Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
Every Christian is called out of the world, out of bondage, out of death, out of sin, into Christ and into His body. And so He reminds them, I'm not the only one that's been called. But if you're a part of the church, then you too have been called out, separated by the power of the Holy Ghost.
As Christians, you and I have been called out of the world. We have received the grace of God. And this was also true for the Apostle Paul. He shared this truth and his incredible privilege to be called as an apostle in the opening verses of the Book of Romans. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and this is the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, where each week we feature the preaching ministry of R.C.
Sproul. Romans is a significant book of the Bible, not just for the truths it communicates, but also for the way the Lord has used it throughout church history. And over the next few weeks, Dr. Sproul will introduce us to Romans and some of the key early truths found in this epistle. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Here's Dr. Sproul to start this series in Romans chapter 1.
All a bondservant of Jesus Christ. I've never been too happy with that English translation of that second clause. In some translations, it simply says, Paul, a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's far worse. Bond servant is an improvement on that, but I think the proper translation should read like this, Paul, a slave of
of Jesus Christ, because the word that he used when he wrote this epistle is the Greek word doulos. And a doulos was not a hired servant who could come and go as he pleased, but a doulos was a person who was purchased. And once he was purchased, he became the possession of his master.
Now where you see this idea of the doulos in Scripture, you will see it always connected to another descriptive word, and that is the word kurios, the highest title. that is given to Jesus by the Father is the title kurios. It translates the Old Testament, Adon, Adonai, which means the sovereign one. That was the name that was reserved for God in the Old Testament.
Now when you see that title Lord or kurios in the New Testament, there are three ways in which it is used. There's a simple common way where somebody could be called kurios. It's just simply like calling them sir, a polite form of address. The supreme use of the term kurios refers, again, to the sovereign God who rules all things.
But there is yet a middle level of usage of the term kurios in the New Testament, and that is it is used to describe somebody who is a slave owner. And in this case, it aptly describes Jesus. And here is where Paul gives his identity. Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ. Not just a servant, a slave.
And here's the paradox, here's the irony, that when the New Testament describes our condition by nature, by birth as fallen people, we are described as people who are slaves to sin. Sin. We are by nature in bondage to sin, bond servants of the flesh. And the only remedy for that, according to the New Testament, is that we be liberated by the work of the Holy Spirit.
For where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. So everyone who's born of the Spirit is set free from slavery. And here's the irony. When Christ sets you free… from slavery to the flesh. He calls you to the royal liberty of being a slave to Him. That's what we mean when we call Him Master. We are acknowledging that in Him We go to get our marching orders. He is the Lord of our lives.
We are not our own. We are not autonomous. We are not independent. And beloved, unless you understand your relationship to Christ in these terms, in all probability, you remain unconverted to this day. A person cannot go to Christ as Savior and say, save me, but I'm going to live my own life the rest of the time, and I'll do what I want to do. No.
Those who come to the cross, who fall on their face before Jesus, who trust in His work of redemption alone, are people who are yielding to Him at the same time as the Master over their lives. So the apostle Paul no kind of dichotomy between Christ as Savior and Christ as Lord, and he makes it clear in the very first sentence of this book, Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle.
Now that's a significant affirmation about himself and his mission. Those of you who are with us remember during our study of the book of Acts that in the early chapters of Acts the church gathered to elect a new apostle, and they set forth the criteria for apostleship in the early church. Do you remember?
And the first criterion for membership in the rank of the apostle was to be a disciple of Jesus during His earthly ministry. and then secondly, to be an eyewitness of the resurrection, and thirdly, most importantly, to be commissioned by Jesus directly and immediately under His authority and appointed by Christ to be His apostle. Now, in these criteria, Paul fails the first two tests.
He was not a disciple of Jesus during Jesus' tenure on earth. Paul was not an eyewitness of the resurrection of Christ. And that's why it was that in the early church there were some who challenged seriously the apostolic authority of Paul. But the supreme qualification for apostolic authority was was to be called directly and immediately by Jesus.
That's why I'm sure three times in the book of Acts, the account of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus where Christ stopped him in his tracks and commissioned him to be his apostle is repeated there in the book of Acts to remind the people that Paul is an authentic agent of revelation. He speaks with the authority of Jesus. And so he sets that forth right at the beginning.
Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ, but I have a call. I have been called, and I have been set apart as an apostle, called to be an apostle, the next phrase, separated. The Latin there is segregated, cut apart from the multitude. to a specific, sacred, consecrated task. And that to which he was separated was this, called to be an apostle and separated to the gospel of God.
This is what this whole epistle is going to be about, the gospel of God. there's something here in this first line of Romans that we could read fifty times and miss the significance of it. When Paul says that he is set apart and consecrated, sanctified as an apostle for the gospel of God, the phrase that he uses here involves a part of speech in the Greek language
which is the genitive, which indicates possession. So when Paul says that he's separated to the gospel of God, he's not saying that I'm commissioned to announce a message or good news about God, but rather this gospel to which I have been separated and called to proclaim is God's gospel. He's the author of it. He's the owner of it.
And I am just simply the messenger who has called and set apart to proclaim to people a message that comes from God Himself. Now, if I said to you, beloved, I said, boy, do I have some great news for you, that would pique your interest. But I said, but let me tell you, This great news comes from God Himself.
Now, you may at first blush, think that I was nuts, and then upon second thought come to the solid conclusion that I am nuts. But if you thought for a moment that I were sober in such a statement and that I really did have a message from God Himself, good news. Wouldn't you want to hear it?
But that's what Paul is saying before he begins to unpack the gospel, before he spells out all of the doctrines of grace in this epistle. He says, I've been commissioned to proclaim God's gospel, that gospel that belongs to Him. It's His possession, and I'm going to communicate it to you. Now notice what he says next. He separated to the gospel of God which He, that is God, promised before the
through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures. Let me pause there for a second. Sometimes we have a tendency to have an artificial separation or distinction between the Old Testament and the New Testament. We talk about the Old Testament as law, the New Testament as gospel, as if there were no law in the New Testament and no gospel in the Old Testament.
What Paul is saying here at the very beginning, the front page, is that this gospel that I'm going to teach you in this letter is is not a novelty. It's not a new insight that I came up with when I had to come up with a thesis for my Ph.D. dissertation. Paul is saying, no, this gospel to which I've been separated is the same gospel that was promised before.
That promise was repeated over and over and over and over and over again. In fact, the first time the gospel was promised in the Old Testament, it was promised in the context of a curse. You remember after the fall, God cursed Adam, cursed Eve, then He cursed the ground, and He cursed the serpent.
and told the serpent that he would be on his belly, and he said that the seed of the woman would crush his head, and in the process, the seed of the woman would bruise his own heel. Centuries and centuries before Christ was delivered to the cross, where there He crushed the head of Satan, while at the same time being bruised for our iniquities.
That gospel of Christ was contained in the promise of the curse of the enemy. We call that the Proto-Evangelium, the first proclamation of the gospel. And so Paul is aware of that. He was an expert student of the Old Testament. He said this gospel, God promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures. I am impressed by rational arguments on certain points, by the power of logic.
and the formal truth of mathematics. I'm impressed when empirical science does due diligence and verifies hypotheses in an amazing way. But nothing moves my soul, my heart, and my mind to acquiesce to its certainty than to find it in the pages of sacred Scripture. which He promised before through His prophets in the Holy Scriptures, concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
There's that kurios and the doulos, concerning Jesus Christ our Lord. Here in this very brief passage, Paul is calling Jesus the Son of God. He's calling Him the Messiah of Israel because that's what the term Christ means. Remember, Jesus Christ is not His name. Jesus is His name.
His full name would be Jesus bar Joseph or Jesus of Nazareth, but the word Christ is His title, and what that title means is Messiah. And so His Son, the Son of God, is the Christ, Paul is saying, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh. This is very important to the Jew.
because the Old Testament prophecies of the coming Messiah said that that Messiah would be of the line and lineage of David. Why does Luke spend so much time on the nativity of Jesus bringing us to Bethlehem, the city of David? Because the Old Testament prophesied that the Messiah would be born out of the loins of David, He would be David's Son, and yet at the same time, David's Lord.
And so Paul reminds his recipients of this epistle here that Jesus Christ was born of the seed of David, katasarka, according to the flesh. I mention that because this again is a very important phrase in the New Testament. Paul will say elsewhere, I did not meet Jesus katasarka. I never met Him in the flesh.
I met Him in the power of His resurrection on the road to Damascus, but I never met Him personally when He was in the flesh during His incarnation in this world, and that's what Paul is getting at here. Now he's saying that according to the flesh in terms of His physical humanity, Jesus was born of the seed of David.
Paul here is not denying the virgin birth where Christ received His deity, not from Mary, not from Joseph. He brought His deity with Him from heaven, and the virgin birth bypassed the normal human reproductive process. But nevertheless, touching His human nature, He was descended from David, but with respect to His divine nature, of course, from the Logos of heaven.
He was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness. Now let me just talk about this for a moment. Paul summarizes the whole life and work of Jesus here. He comes, He's born of the seed of David, and then God verifies that declares Him to be His Son in power.
And obviously what Paul is referring to is clear because he mentions it in the next breath, by the power of His resurrection. When God the Holy Spirit raised the corpse of Jesus from the tomb, it was God's announcement to the world that this was His Son. And so, by what evidence do we believe that Jesus is the Son of God?
By the testimony of God who has declared Him to be His Son through the power of the resurrection. Remember back when we were studying Acts and Paul went to Athens and he debated with the philosophers on Mars Hill there at the Areopagus? And remember he said, the former days of ignorance God overlooked when they had their monument to an unknown God.
He said, the former days of ignorance God overlooked, but now God commands all men everywhere to repent and to submit to Christ, whom God has appointed to be the judge of all of the earth. and who has declared Him to be His Son by the resurrection. And that's what Paul appeals to here. He said, I'm not declaring to you that Jesus is the Son of God.
God has declared that to you by the Holy Ghost in the power of the resurrection. And through Him, we've received grace and apostleship. I could stop there and just say through Jesus we have received grace, and we've received the gift and the responsibility of apostleship, but grace and apostleship have a purpose here.
We've received grace and apostleship for obedience to the faith among all nations for His name. among whom you also are the called of Jesus Christ. Do you see how quickly Paul moves here from his own call as an apostle to the call that was shared by every Christian in the church at Rome, to the call that is shared by every Christian in every church in every age?
The Bible calls it the elect, the called-out ones. The church is the ekklesia, taking the verb kaleo, meaning to call, and the prefix ek meaning out of, that every Christian is called out of the world, out of bondage, out of death, out of sin, into Christ and into His body. And so He reminds them, I'm not the only one that's been called.
But if you're a part of the church, then you too have been called out. separated by the power of the Holy Ghost. And what are you called to be? Well, he says in verse 7, to all who are in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints. You know that's your vocation? What are you studying? I'm studying to be a saint. I think it'll ever happen. It's already happened if you are in Christ Jesus.
you're already numbered among the saints. The word for saint in the New Testament is the word that means sanctified one, one who has been set apart by the Holy Spirit, one who's been called inwardly by Christ to Himself. And if you put your trust in Christ, you are right now, as I speak, a saint. You're set apart. You're a part of the invisible church, the church of that is beloved of God.
Finally, in this section, Paul says his traditional greeting, grace to you and peace. You know, in the Old Testament days, the Jews greeted each other the same way they do today. Shalom. Peace be unto you. And the response would be, and peace also to you. You hear your Jewish friends say, pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
The Jewish benediction for centuries has been that the Lord would bless you and keep you, cause His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you, lift up the light of His countenance upon you and give you peace. Not as the world gives, said Jesus in His final will and testament before He left this world, but He left us His peace, peace that transcends
earthly peace, peace that is permanent, a peace that is eternal, where the warfare between the sinner and God is over. It's not an uneasy truce. God doesn't rattle the sword every time He's distressed with your behavior. being reconciled, being justified, as we will see later, we possess that peace right now, now and forevermore.
And so that's integral to the apostolic greeting, grace and peace, because they go together, because the peace of God is not something we could ever earn, we could ever merit, we could ever deserve. That peace that comes from God is by His grace. And so what Paul wishes for his friends in the church in Rome is that they would receive the grace of God.
Dear ones, that's my deepest prayer for each one of you, that you would know the grace of God and the power of the resurrection of Jesus, and that you would know His peace today and forevermore.
Amen. That was R.C. Sproul preaching from Romans 1 on this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. The teaching of Romans has sparked reformation and revival throughout church history whenever people have grasped the Spirit's message through the pen of the Apostle Paul. And in sermons preached at St. Andrew's Chapel, Dr. Sproul preached and taught through Paul's magnum opus.
Those sermons eventually became his expositional commentary. And until midnight tonight, we'll send you this hardcover volume when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Better grasp the theological truths and practical applications of this epistle with R.C. Sproul as your thoughtful guide, line by line, through Romans. Request your copy today at renewingyourmind.org.
And thank you for your generosity, which is being used to extend the reach of Renewing Your Mind and fuel the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Dr. Sproul will continue his series next Sunday. Here's a preview.
There is who Jesus is and what Jesus did, and then the question is how that benefits me. So that in preaching the gospel, we preach about Jesus and we preach about how we are brought into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.
Thank you.