The Apostle Paul wrote his letter to the Romans to help establish Christians in their understanding of the gospel. From his sermon series in Romans, today R.C. Sproul underlines our need to know the gospel and to remind ourselves regularly of its truth. Get R.C. Sproul’s new devotional, The Power of the Gospel: A Year in Romans, for your donation of any amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3664/the-power-of-the-gospel 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
If you give your testimony to your neighbor and say, you know, I became a Christian last year, you're bearing witness about Jesus, but you're not telling them the gospel, because the gospel is not about you. The gospel is about Jesus.
Getting the gospel right is essential. R.C. Sproul said it many times, when the gospel is at stake, everything is at stake. And this is why the Reformation of the 16th century was so important, as it marked light shining into the darkness, a rediscovery of the gospel. Welcome to Reformation Week on Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham.
The book of Romans is a significant book in the history of the Reformation. It was as Martin Luther read Romans that a light bulb, as it were, went on. Or as Luther himself described it, the doors of paradise swung open and he walked through. All week, you'll hear sermons from R.C. Sproul in Romans, and you'll have the opportunity to be one of the first to receive a new resource from R.C. Sproul.
It's called The Power of the Gospel. It's a daily devotional that lets you spend a year in Romans with Dr. Sproul as your guide and with special applications from each reading. Secure your copy today when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org and we'll send you this new hardcover devotional when it begins to ship in just a few weeks. Well, here's R.C.
Sproul on the gospel and the verse that changed everything for Martin Luther.
Paul is continuing his greetings and his opening comments to the church at Rome before he plunges into the content of the theological understanding of the gospel that he sets forth throughout this entire epistle. And so he begins by saying, first of all, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all. The apostle had a heart that was constantly filled with thanksgiving.
The word that he used here in the epistle was the word eucharisto, from which the church derives the term eucharist, which was a word used to describe the celebration of the Lord's Supper in the primitive Christian church, because at the heart of the celebration of the Lord's Supper was a profound spirit of thanksgiving for what God had wrought for us in the work of Jesus Christ.
And so, Paul mentions his spirit of thankfulness for these Roman Christians, and he says, because your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. When first century people spoke of the world, they were speaking of the known world. They were speaking of basically the Mediterranean world. That was in their purview.
And when Paul says, I'm rejoicing that your faith is known throughout the world, he's talking in the way people talked at that time, and he's saying that I'm glad that throughout the our known world, throughout the Mediterranean world, people everywhere are talking about your faith, which has made an impact. He's so eager that the people who receive this epistle understand
the depth of passion that he feels in his grateful heart for the remembrance that is published throughout the known world of their faith that he swears a vow. He says, for God is my witness. And we will see later, God willing, that this is not the last time in this epistle that the apostle takes such a vow to guarantee the truth of what he's saying.
God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of His Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers, making request if by some means, now at last, I may find a way in the will of God to come to you. But I also don't want us to jump too hastily over a little comment that he makes in passing here when he says this vow.
God is my witness whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of His Son. Earlier on in the first chapter, Paul said that he was separated as an apostle and was called by God to preach the gospel of God. That phrase, the gospel of God, did not mean the gospel about God. but it is the gospel that is the possession of God. God owns that gospel. He's the one who invents the gospel.
He's the one who commissions Paul to teach the gospel. The gospel does not originate with Paul. originates with God. But now, he uses the same structure to talk about the gospel. Instead of talking about the gospel of God, he talks the gospel of God's Son, Jesus Christ. So, in the same sense, the gospel is the possession of Jesus. But it's not only the possession of Jesus.
Jesus is the heart of the content of the gospel. During the earthly ministry of Jesus, the term gospel is linked with not particularly the person of Jesus, but it is the gospel of the kingdom. And Jesus would say in His parables, the kingdom of God is like unto this, or the kingdom of God is like unto that. And so, on the lips of Jesus, the gospel is
was about this dramatic moment in history where the long-awaited Messiah, the long-awaited Son of David, who would restore the kingdom to the people, the kingdom of God Himself, was now breaking through in time and space. And the good news was the good news of the kingdom. But by the time we get to the epistles, and particularly the Pauline epistles,
The term gospel takes on a new shade of understanding. Now it's the gospel of Jesus Christ. And the gospel of Jesus Christ has a clear content to it. At the heart of the gospel is the announcement of who Jesus is. and what He accomplished in His lifetime.
If you give your testimony to your neighbor and say, you know, I became a Christian last year, I gave my heart to Jesus, or whatever, you're bearing witness about Jesus, but you're not telling them the gospel, because the gospel is not about you. The gospel is about Jesus, what He did, His life of perfect obedience.
His atoning death on the cross, His resurrection from the dead, His ascension into heaven, His outpouring of the Holy Ghost upon the church. Those are crucial elements of the gospel that we call the objective aspects of the New Testament gospel of Christ. However,
In addition to the person and work of Jesus, there is also in the New Testament use of the term gospel, the question of how the benefits accomplished by the objective work of Jesus are subjectively appropriated to the believer. So first of all, there is who Jesus is and what Jesus did, and then the question is how that benefits me.
And that's why Paul conjoins with the objective account of the person and work of Jesus, particularly to the Galatians, that essential to the gospel is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 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.
And so, Paul now speaks of the gospel of his son and then says that without ceasing, he mentions them in his prayers, making the request that he might find a way to get there, as I said. He said, for I long to see you. I've heard about you. I get reports from Rome, but I haven't seen you. I haven't met you. And I long, I have this deep yearning, this passion in my soul to meet you face to face.
Why? That I may impart to you some spiritual gift so that you may be established. And established means not started in the Christian faith, but confirmed, built up, edified. That's what he means by established. He said, I want to come to you not for what you can do for me. And I don't want to come to you and lay hands on you so that you can receive one of the charismatic gifts.
That's not what he's talking about here. I'm talking about establishing you in confidence and in maturity in your Christian faith. Now, let's keep that in mind, that this is why Paul wrote this letter to the Romans, and it's why in the providence of God this letter is given to us. It's for our edification.
that the faith that has taken root in our souls may be established, that we may grow to maturity and full conformity to the image of Christ. And he makes this comment in passing. I don't want to labor it, but he says, that is, that I may be encouraged together with you by the mutual faith, both of you and me. One of the things that made Paul such a tremendous believer
pastor as well as a theologian and missionary and evangelist and all the other things he was. You notice when he wrote to the church at Corinth and recalls the experiences that he had with them, he said, and I was with you in your afflictions, in your trials. He said, Paul didn't just preach at people or preach to people.
but he became involved with them in his heart, in his prayers, in his concern for their well-being. And he wanted to encourage them. And he said, I long to be with you, not just that I can encourage you, but you can encourage me. Is there anybody who doesn't need to be encouraged?
If people are throwing stones at you everywhere you go, it's nice to have somebody give you a word of encouragement from time to time. And he said, I long to come to Rome that I can encourage you and that you can encourage me. But he says, I'm a debtor both to the Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise. Wow.
the language that he uses here, notice he doesn't say, I'm a debtor to the Jew and to the Greek. Not at this point. He's saying, I'm a debtor to the Greek and to the barbarian. Now when he talks about the Greek here, he's talking about the highly cultured, civilized, intellectual elite of the ancient culture as distinguished from the rest of the Gentiles who were pagan barbarians.
And he says, but I'm in debt both to the Greek, the high-minded, and to the barbarian. And what does he mean? He's not talking here about a pecuniary obligation or debt. It's not that he owes money to both sides. But he felt a moral debt. He was burdened by an obligation that went with his office as an apostle. Remember, he was the one who was set apart to be the apostle to the Gentiles.
And he said, I'm spending my whole life discharging this obligation that I owe. Ultimately, it's the debt he owes to God. It's the debt he owes to Christ. But yet at the same time, he's transferring that indebtedness, that obligation to the people who need to hear the gospel. He says, as long as I'm alive, I can't pay that debt because I owe my life to
to every person that I meet, to the wise, to the unwise. He's putting them all together to say, everyone I meet, I meet as one who owes my fellow person the message of the gospel. So, he says, as much as is in me, I'm ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also. Again, he's reaching down into his soul to speak of the depth of his own passion.
He says, as much as is in me, every fiber of my being is ready to preach the gospel to you. I can't wait to get there. Why? Why does he say it? Well, he answers that question. Listen to what he says. for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ." And he says why in a moment, but let's just listen to this statement, for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.
Have you ever been ashamed of being a Christian? Have you ever tried to duck the hostility of this world, the scorn that is heaped upon those who are known as disciples of Christ? in a culture that is hostile to Christianity. If you think our culture is hostile to the gospel, think of the culture that Paul was dealing with in the first century. He says, I'm not ashamed. I glory in it.
Let him who boasts, let him boast of the Lord. There's nothing that turns his crank more than to be known as a Christian. No shame. Jesus warned us, didn't He? If you're ashamed of Me before men, I'll be ashamed of you before My Father. But that's a real crunch for many Christians. They want to be Secret Service Christians or what I call Clairol Christians.
Only their hairdresser knows for sure whether they're a Christian. They don't want to be known as being holier than thou. I mean, if you say one word to your friends about Christ, you'll be accused of trying to shove the gospel down their throat. That's the nature of the beast. And so, we get rebuffed enough times that pretty soon we become embarrassed about our faith. Not the apostle.
He says, as much as is in me, I can't wait to get the Roman. I'll tell you why. Because I'm not ashamed. of the gospel. Now again, why is he not ashamed? And listen to this because this is dynamite literally. Dunamis is the Greek word from which we get the dynamite. For it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first, and also for the Greek.
What do people want today when they go to the person who promises healing and slays them in the Spirit? What are they looking for? I can tell you what they're looking for. They're looking for power. They want a Christian experience that is powerful. They want power to manipulate their own environment. That's the great goal of the New Age movement, to be able to bend spoons with your mind and
Only one is omnipotent, and it's the Lord God. And the Lord God has power to spare. He doesn't need Joseph's pants. He doesn't even need the gospel. Yet it has pleased the Lord God omnipotent to invest His power not in Joseph's pants, or in the preacher's ability to slay somebody in the Spirit, but the power is invested in the gospel.
There is no program known to man that has the power that the gospel has. It is the Word of God that He has promised that He will not allow to return unto Him void. That's the method, the foolishness of preaching that He's chosen to save the world. Paul says, I'm not ashamed. I want to preach the gospel. Why? Because it's the power of God and the salvation.
It's the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew and to the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith. In the gospel, The righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.
This was the verse that God the Holy Spirit used to awaken Luther as he was preparing his lectures on the book of Romans when he glanced at a manuscript from Saint Augustine where Augustine read this text, and it says here when it speaks of the righteousness of God, Augustine said in his note, this is not the righteousness by which God Himself is righteous.
But it is that righteousness that God provides for people who don't have any righteousness. It's that righteousness that He makes available by free grace to all who believe. what Luther called the alien righteousness, the righteousness that is not our own, but it is somebody else's righteousness.
It's Jesus' righteousness, and this Luther who had sought every means that he knew in the monastery to satisfy the demands of God's law and never had peace, who would spend three, four hours in the confessional every day confessing the sins from the last day. He said, and all of a sudden,
He understood another righteousness, a righteousness that was the free gift of God to all who put their trust in Christ, a righteousness that would avail to satisfy all of the demands of God's law. Luther said, when I saw that, the doors of paradise swung open, and I walked through. No wonder that man stood against kings.
and officials of the church who would refuse to compromise because once he tasted the gospel of Jesus Christ, once he was delivered from the pangs and torment of the law, nobody was going to take it from him. I was involved in this international council on biblical inerrancy. many years ago, a ten-year initiative to defend the doctrine of Scripture, and I was the president of that council.
And I was asked to go to a seminary and meet with their whole faculty because the faculty had departed from that view, and I had this discussion behind closed doors for about three hours. And afterwards, I was walking to my car in the parking lot, and the dean was with me, and he said, I just don't understand you, R.C. He said, what do you care so deeply that the Bible is inerrant.
What difference does it make? What difference does it make? I said, my life was saved by this Word. There is nothing more precious to my soul than every word that's found on this page. How can you be the dean of a theological seminary and ask me, what difference does it make? It's the Word of God. So I understood the sense of liberation that Luther experienced from reading that text.
This is the thematic verse for the entire epistle. Everything that comes after it will be an explanation of this one line. For in it the righteousness of God, the word there, dukeosune. It's the word that is used for justification in the New Testament, and we're going to be seeing that word again and again as we pour over this manuscript to the Romans.
And finally, Paul says, and if the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith. Three times that verse is quoted in the New Testament. Here, it's in Galatians, it's in Hebrews chapter 10. All three times, the text that is quoted goes back to the Old Testament book of the prophet Habakkuk. Behold the proud.
His soul is not upright in him, but the just shall live by faith. That is the righteous person, righteous in the sight of God, not by his own righteousness. We've already established that. The righteous lives by trust. Jesus in the Judean wilderness under the unbridled assault of Satan, lonely, hungry, Satan says, take these stones and make them bread. I can't do that.
Don't you understand, Satan, that man does not live by bread alone? but by every word that proceeds forth from the mouth of God. I've said to the people of St. Andrews really a hundred times, anybody can believe in God. What it means to be a Christian is to believe God, to trust Him when He speaks. And that does not require a leap of faith. That does not require a crucifixion of the intellect.
It requires a crucifixion of the pride. Because there is no one ever more trustworthy than God. Why wouldn't you trust God? When we don't trust Him, it's because we transfer to Him our own corrupt qualities. God doesn't have any of those corrupt qualities. You can trust Him with your life. And that's the theme of this book, that just shall live by faith. And from that vantage point,
Paul opens up the depths and the riches of the whole gospel for the people of God.
That was R.C. Sproul on this Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind, Preaching from Romans. This sermon was preached at St. Andrew's Chapel in Sanford, Florida, and these sermons have been presented in a new year-long devotional called The Power of the Gospel. Spend 2025 studying Romans with R.C. Sproul as your guide and with additional application given for each reading.
This new hardcover resource begins shipping in just a few weeks, so be one of the first to receive a copy when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. This could also be a great gift for your pastor or a church leader. So respond today at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes.
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