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Welcome to a study of the greatest piece of literature of all times, the epistle to the Romans, written by this greatest of all men, the apostle Paul. I call it the King of the epistles. There is glory and grace tucked into every chapter. Romans demolishes all humanistic, man-centered Christianity and exalts God, His grace, His power, His Son. Romans must always lead us to humble, heart-melting worship of our great and awesome God. Pray as we move through this book that God would use it mightily in our lives. No book has been used more powerfully in the life of the church than Romans. You may have heard the story about the lady who was sitting next to a stranger in church as the pastor was preaching on the book of Romans. At the end of the service she spoke with the young man. After learning a little about him, she asked, “How long have you been a Christian?” The young man thought a moment, looked at his watch and said, “About ten minutes!”
Martin Luther wrote about Romans: “This Epistle is really the chief part of the New Testament and the very purest Gospel, and is worthy not only that every Christian should know it word for word, by heart, but occupy himself with it every day, as the daily bread of the soul. It can never be read or pondered too much, and the more it is dealt with the more precious it becomes, and the better it tastes.” Chrysostom had it read to him aloud twice every week. John Calvin declared that “when one gains a knowledge of this Epistle, he has an entrance opened to him to all the most hidden treasures of Scripture.” And J. I. Packer, author of Knowing God, commented, “All roads in the Bible are seen most clearly from Romans, and when the message of Romans gets into a man’s heart there is no telling what may happen.” This is why Paul boldly declares in verse 16, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”
THE MAN, HIS MINISTRY, AND HIS MESSAGE
Romans 1:1, Paul, a bond-servant (slave) of Christ Jesus, called as an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.
My Name Is Paul. Notice how Paul begins this colossal piece of literature, “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus.” He doesn’t throw a whole alphabet behind his name like Dr. Paul, BA, MDIV, THM, PHD, DD with a list of all the mega-churches he had planted in Macedonia, Greece and Asia. Just “Paul.” He grew up in a university town, Tarsus. He was familiar with Greek culture, Jewish religion, and was a Roman citizen. He was the best known Pharisee in the world of the Pharisees, highly trained in the law by the Rabbi Gamaliel.
Not only that, but he was so zealous for God that he determined to destroy this new heresy called Christianity and exterminate Christians. He approved of stoning Stephen and then, furiously enraged, he went around dragging Christians to prison. One day he got on his high horse and headed out to Damascus to take Christians prisoners when suddenly his whole world changed. He was struck down by the brilliant presence of Jesus Christ Himself on that Damascus Road and Christ turned him into a zealous, Christ-loving apostle and missionary. Here you have the amazing sovereign grace and power of God turning His greatest enemy on earth into His greatest ambassador and apostle!
I’m a Slave of Christ Jesus. Paul had no arrogance about himself or his position. “I’m a slave of Christ Jesus. He purchased me with His blood.” When he encountered that brilliant presence of Christ on that Damascus Road he first asked, “Who are you?” And then immediately, “What do you want me to do?” Paul’s identity was now Christ. Philippians 1:21, “For me to live is Christ.” We are all about identity today. I identify as this or that. Paul says, “I identify as a slave of Christ. That’s who I am and I am here to do his will.” The most brilliant Christian leader of all time, his simple identity is “a slave of Christ Jesus.”
I’m a Called Apostle. Paul didn’t seek this position. God called him by His grace. He didn’t think, “Wow, I’m a really great man, I’m a great communicator; think I’ll sign up to be an apostle.” No, God called him and gave him this title and responsibility. He wasn’t in the least puffed up about being an apostle, even though God used him above all other apostles. Listen to him in 1 Corinthians 15:9, “For I am the least of the apostles, and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” Barnhouse talks about a rather cocky young preacher who was asked by an aged Black gentleman after the sermon, “Was you sent or did you just went?” Paul was sent!
An apostle had to have seen Christ and been personally called by Christ. An apostle was a sent one with special authority and powers. The apostles and prophets were the foundation of the church. There are no apostles today, even though some churches think there are. But there are many Marys and Marthas, Timothys and Tituses, Phoebes and Pricillas. Phoebe is believed to have carried this precious epistle to Rome (Romans 16:1). You are not an apostle Paul, but God has sovereignly placed and gifted you, as He has every believer in the body of Christ, for a purpose. If you’re a believer, God has His hand on your life too.
I’m Separated to the Gospel of God. This is amazing. In Galatians 1:11-20 Paul gives us insight into his conversion. He says God had set him apart from his mother’s womb (v. 15-16). Paul also tells us he received what he was preaching by revelation from Jesus Christ, not from any man (v.12). After his conversion Paul spent three years in the Arabian wilderness and Damacus before meeting with any church leaders in Jerusalem. Christ Himself taught Paul and then after three years, there he goes, carrying the one message that this sinful, evil, godless world needs: the gospel, the good news not about God, but the good news from God about Jesus Christ. What a calling. I love his mission statement.
Acts 20:24, “But I do not consider my life of any account as dear to myself, so that I may finish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify solemnly of the gospel of the grace of God.
What a man, what a ministry, what a message. The good news is from God Himself. God gave it. Only God Almighty could come up with this incredible plan about God becoming man, dying as a criminal and yet the Savior of the world, bearing the sins of all who would believe in Him. It’s God’s good news because only God could have thought of it. The good news from God and the only good news from God for sinners. And that good news is all about God’s Son, Jesus Christ.
Now here is Paul around AD 55 on his third missionary journey, sitting in Corinth and under the inspiration of the Spirit of God penning this magnum opus, this great letter to the most powerful city on earth, a city of over one million people. People from Rome had been to Jerusalem and carried the gospel back to their city. There’s no evidence that Peter founded the church in Rome and Paul had never been to Rome until he was taken there as a prisoner (Acts 28).
God led Paul to write this great document, a systematic presentation of the great truths of the gospel, the truths that built the church of Jesus Christ and continue throughout the centuries to our own day. Here is where you find the great doctrines of man’s total depravity, justification by faith alone, of propitiation, of reconciliation, of union with Christ. Romans stands first in the epistles like a great door to let light into the rest of the epistles. It rules the New Testament like a doctrinal King with the key word of righteousness; Ephesians sits a little later as the Queen, highlighting the glory of the grace of our salvation. The Swiss theologian Godet states, “Every movement of revival in the history of the church has been connected with the teachings set forth in Romans.”
THE POWER AND INFLUENCE OF ROMANS
Romans has had a powerful influence in so many lives. For Carolyn and me, it began when we first came to Christ. Someone led us through the Romans Road. Then a student from the Philadelphia College of the Bible, Mrs. Moses’ son Tom Moses, came to our farmhouse and taught us and several others this book of Romans. When I was in seminary Carolyn worked for a lawyer in Warsaw, Indiana. He and I met together weekly and we made our way through Romans. I can still see him writing notes in the margin with his black felt-tipped pen. He also introduced me to a special mixed drink of tomato juice spiked with horse radish. Delicious.
In the fourth century a young man from northern Africa named Augustine wrestled with his own lusts, philosophy, and the gospel. His mother prayed for him with tears. He went to Italy and one day at age 31 he was walking in a garden in Milan, greatly distressed by his guilt and afraid he’d never be forgiven, when he heard a child singing, “Tolle Lege” or “Take up and read.” He opened a New Testament lying nearby and his eyes fell on Romans 13:13-14,“Let us behave properly as in the day, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual promiscuity and sensuality, not in strife and jealousy. 14 But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh in regard to its lusts.” Later he wrote: “Instantly, as the sentence ended—by a light, as it were of severity infused into my heart—all the gloom of doubt vanished away.” God used Augustine mightily to champion the doctrine of sovereign grace and refute Pelagius, who denied original sin and total depravity.
About 1000 years later God used Romans to open the heart of a miserable monk in Wittenberg, Germany. His name was Martin Luther. He found no relief for his guilt. He saw the righteousness of God as divine wrath condemning him and he actually uttered, “Love God? I hated Him.” But through God’s good providence around 1519 he was lecturing on the epistle of Romans there in the University of Wittenberg. While pondering Romans 1:17, “The just shall live by faith,” God shot a bolt of light into his soul and gave him understanding of the gospel of God’s grace and mercy, justification by faith. He wrote, “Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning…. This passage of Paul became to me a gateway to heaven.” And thus the Reformation was launched, a time that has impacted God’s people all the way to our own day. Those five solas in our entryway are clarion calls of the Reformation: salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, based on Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone.
Two hundred years later, in the evening of May 24, 1738, John Wesley attended a small Bible study group in Aldersgate Street in London. He had recently returned from America as a missionary with no assurance of his own salvation. He admitted, “I went to America to convert the Indians; but O, who shall convert me.” As he listened to someone read from the preface of Luther’s commentary on Romans he says, “About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, in Christ alone, for my salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken my sins away, even mine; and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
We could go on and on. May God use Romans to bring people to Christ right here in our church. Donald Barnhouse began his ministry preaching on Romans 1:1 and took three years to get through it. I have all four volumes on Romans by James Montgomery Boice. I especially like Barnhouse and Boice because they were both from Philadelphia and that God still has a future for Israel in Romans 11. Boice said to undertake a study of Romans is “a formidable task.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached 366 sermons on Romans. The first five are on verse 1! I recently buzzed through all five of them. By the way, this is the fourth or possibly fifth time for me to preach through Romans.
A DRONE’S VIEW OF ROMANS
We want to get the big picture now. We used to say bird’s eye view, but now it’s a drone’s view, like we saw the drone’s view of those houses blown to smithereens last Wednesday! Someone divided Romans into five parts and they work for me: sin, salvation, sanctification, sovereignty, and service. I want to keep it simple for our memory.
SIN – Romans 1-3:23
First God tells us the truth about our own nature: there is none righteous, not one. God’s wrath is upon every one outside of Christ. In Romans 1 Paul’s going to preview our own times as He describes God turning us over to idolatry, sexual perversion, lesbianism, and homosexuality. God’s wrath is turning us over to our own lusts and passions, which includes a reprobate mind that can’t even think rationally: males think they are females and females think they are males. I read an ESPN reporter this week saying, “I’ve decided to become a man.” We’ll see much more of this in the weeks ahead. But religious people are also guilty of hypocrisy and Paul ends up in Romans 3:23, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” We are helpless and hopeless in our own power before God. Left in our sin we are damned. Left to our own will we kick against God and will not submit to our own Creator. Our status could not be worse; but God’s good news could not be better.
SALVATION – Romans 3:22-5:21
Here comes that good news from God. We have no righteousness, but God has provided His own righteousness for those who submit to Him in faith. God has acted. God has intervened in human history, in the sin-cursed human race. He has done for us what we couldn’t possibly do for ourselves, and He did it all through His Son, Jesus Christ. Instead of the wrath of God unleashed on us in our sins, it was unleashed on Christ as our substitute. His perfect righteousness is imputed to our account. Instead of being condemned, we are justified or declared righteous by faith alone. Instead of hostility, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
These are the doctrines of the great sermons and great revivals through the centuries as men and women, boys and girls, are brought face to face with their sin and need of a Savior. And then God’s sovereign grace reaches down and gives them that new life in Christ they so desperately need. As Luther found out, no church, no continual confession, no priest, no monkery, no great resolves of heart, no self-help programs, no self-esteem pep talks, no watered down make you feel good about yourself cotton candy sermons, no false assurances that everything will be okay, you’re not all that bad, will do. Only Christ, the Son of the living God, will do. We come to realize that we must have Christ or we perish under the weight of our own sin before a holy God. This is the foundation of the Christian life taught here in Romans. Everything flows from this relationship with God through faith in Christ alone.
SANCTIFICATION – Romans 6-8
Paul assumes someone will ask, “If salvation is by faith alone that magnifies the grace of God, why not continue in sin and make grace abound all the more.” In Romans 6:1 Paul flatly states,
“Don’t even think about parking there.” That’s impossible for true believers because when you come to Christ, you are brought into union with Christ. He is your new identity. You died with Him, were buried with Him, were raised to newness of life with Him. You used to be a slave of sin, but now you are a slave of righteousness. Paul deals with our indwelling sin in chapter seven and then we climb with him up the Mt. Everest of the Bible in Romans 8, from no condemnation to no separation – eternally secure in Christ.
SOVEREIGNTY – Romans 9-11
God has mercy on whom He wills. He is the potter, we are the clay, and He has the rights over the clay. Paul assures us in chapter 11 that God will fulfill all His promises to Israel and then bursts out in that grand doxology, ending with “for from Him, and through Him, and to Him are all things, to whom be the glory forever!”
SERVICE – Romans 12-16
Paul ends Romans with a focus on the application of all these great truths about the grace and mercy to our lives. He begins with this call to personal devotion to giving your whole life to God:
Romans 12:1-2, Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. 2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
We thank God for arresting and converting that great Pharisee Saul on the Damascus Road and transforming him into the greatest Christian mind and pattern of all time. From a Pharisee of the Pharisees to the apostle of the apostles. While Marx, Darwin, and Freud did all they could to destroy Christianity and eliminate the very thought of God, Paul saw himself as a slave of Jesus Christ and did all he could to build up the people of God. Do you see yourself as Paul did, a joyful, happy, willing, loving slave of Jesus Christ? Is your greatest joy in serving Christ? For Paul there were no options. That’s why he began Romans with, “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus.”