The Righteous Shall Live By Faith
An excerpt from “Not Ashamed of the Gospel” Season Five/Episode Five (Romans 1:16-17)
What, then, should we take with us from Romans 1:16-17?
The first thing we need to say is that, like Paul, we must never be ashamed of the gospel. Yes, the cross is a scandalous message. Yes, the cross is foolishness to the Greeks. Unfortunately, in much of American religion (and even in much of evangelicalism), the gospel has become a message about how the holy God makes himself acceptable to self-righteous sinners. While preachers, teachers, and evangelists have every right to be cognizant of the culture and communicate the gospel accordingly, we are never given the right to change the message of the cross to appease that culture.
The power of God is revealed whenever the gospel is preached, not when ministers seek to entertain, strive to be politically relevant, or speak to the whims of the congregation. Until Christ’s church recovers its confidence in the preaching of the cross, we will never see a healthy church, nor witness genuine reformation. Let us sincerely desire and eagerly pray that we may follow Paul’s example and that we, as individual believers and as church members, may never be ashamed of the gospel. For the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of all who believe. The preaching of the gospel is the means by which God saves sinners! "The righteous shall live by faith." But how can people come to faith when there is no gospel? As P.T. Forsyth once put it, "We must preach to our age, but woe to us if it is our age which we preach, and only hold up the mirror to the time."
A final point of application is that we need to be very clear about the nature of Paul’s gospel. The words and phrases, and even the prepositions used here, really do matter! When the gospel—the message that Jesus died for our sins and that he was raised for our justification—is preached, God freely bestows a right standing upon all those who renounce their own righteousness and receive what God freely offers to them through faith in Jesus Christ, namely the perfect righteousness of Christ himself. In the gospel, a righteousness from God is revealed to all who believe, whether they be Jew or Gentile!
When this gospel is preached, God demonstrates his power to give life, to create faith, and to deliver all those who trust in Jesus Christ from the wrath to come. In this gospel, a righteousness from God is revealed—a righteousness without which none of us will see heaven. But if we believe God’s promise to save us from the guilt of our sin, God regards us as though we had never sinned and as though we had kept his commandments perfectly. Indeed, "the righteous shall live by faith," and that faith is created through the gospel in which the righteousness of God is revealed.
A familiar message? Yes, but one we need to hear over and over again.