A man went to see his doctor in an acute state of anxiety. “Doctor,” he said, “you have to help me. I’m dying. Everywhere I touch it hurts. I touch my head and it hurts. I touch my leg and it hurts. I touch my stomach and it hurts. I touch my chest and it hurts. You have to help me, Doc. Everything hurts.”
The doctor gave the man a complete examination. “Mr. Smith,” he said, “I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is you are not dying. The bad news is you have a broken finger.”[1]
The book we are visiting today in our journey along Route 66 is also a good news, bad news story. The bad news is much worse than having a broken finger. But, like the doctor in my little story, this book begins with the good news. Listen for God’s word to you from Romans 1:1-17…
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake. And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.
To all in Rome who are loved by God and called to be his holy people:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world. God, whom I serve in my spirit in preaching the gospel of his Son, is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all times; and I pray that now at last by God’s will the way may be opened for me to come to you.
I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong— that is, that you and I may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith. I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that I planned many times to come to you (but have been prevented from doing so until now) in order that I might have a harvest among you, just as I have had among the other Gentiles.
I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”
AUTHOR
Who was the author of this letter? Unlike the Gospels, Acts, and so many books of the Old Testament, we do not have to guess who the author of this letter to the Church at Rome was. Thankfully, he tells us right up front. His name is Paul. All Bible scholars, ancient and modern, are agreed that The Letter to the Church at Rome is an authentic letter of the Apostle Paul.
In the book of Acts we saw Luke’s account of Paul’s dramatic turnaround on the road to Damascus. Paul calls himself “a servant of Christ Jesus”, literally a slave. Furthermore, Paul says he is “set apart for the gospel of God”.
If you were to ask Paul what his life was about, I think he would say, “It is about the good news of Jesus Christ.” Paul’s life was dramatically changed by his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus. As a result, he lived the rest of his life for the purpose of telling others the good news about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. As he says in Acts 20:24, “However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the gospel of God’s grace.”
Greg Laurie tells the story of a woman who had finished shopping and returned to her car. She found four men inside. She dropped her shopping bags, drew a handgun, and screamed, “I have a gun and I know how to use it. Get out of the car.” Those men did not wait for a second invitation; they got out of the car and ran like madmen.
The woman, somewhat shaken, loaded her shopping bags and then got into the car. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not get her key into the ignition. Then it dawned on her that her car was parked four or five spaces away. She loaded her grocery bags into her own car and then drove to the police station to turn herself in. The desk sergeant to whom she told the story nearly fell off his chair laughing. He pointed to the other end of the counter where four men were reporting a carjacking by an old woman with thick glasses and curly white hair, less than five feet tall, carrying a large handgun.
No charges were filed.
That woman thought she was getting into her own car, but it really belonged to someone else. In the same way, we often think our lives are our own, but they really belong to someone else. In 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, Paul says, “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”
Paul knew that his life was bought by the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross. Paul knew that he did not belong to himself. That realization, that came to him on the road to Damascus, changed the trajectory of his life. The more we become aware of the same truth, the more it will change the direction of our lives as well.
DATE
When did Paul write this letter to the Church at Rome? We can gather from Romans 15 that Paul wrote this letter when he was on his way from Greece to Jerusalem to deliver the contribution he had been collecting for the poor. This may have been in the early spring of 57 CE. Some scholars date the letter slightly earlier or later. Paul probably wrote the letter from Corinth or Cenchreae because of references to some of the Christians in those places: Phoebe, Gaius, and Erastus.
THEMES
Paul tells us in Romans 1:7 that he is writing to the Church at Rome. But what was this church like?
It was a collection of house churches really. This Christian movement in Rome was not started by Paul himself but perhaps by Jews from Rome who became believers in Jesus when Peter preached on Pentecost in Jerusalem. (See Acts 2.) There is also a very early tradition that Peter preached in Jerusalem. We can gather from this letter that the Church in Rome was composed of Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus.
Paul tells us several things in these opening verses of his letter about the Christians in Rome. He says that they are called to belong to Jesus Christ. In fact, they are called to be saints, holy ones, a people set apart for Jesus. They are loved by God and their faith is being reported all over the world. This is a group of people who are making a positive impact for Jesus.
Why did Paul write this letter to the Church at Rome? He writes to prepare them for his coming. He writes to explain the relationship between Jew and Gentile in God’s overall plan of salvation. Perhaps he writes to prevent at Rome some of the problems that developed in the churches of Galatia, namely, legalism, the belief that we can somehow be saved by our own good works. The bottom line is that Paul writes to remind the Church at Rome of the good news.
There is so much bad news in the world and in the 24/7 news cycle that I think we too need to be reminded of the good news.
What is that good news?
Paul summarizes it very succinctly in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5…
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.
That’s the good news about Jesus that Paul writes to remind the Roman Christians and us about.
Romans is also a letter that emphasizes the fact that God is sovereign. Even the time and place of the writing of this letter remind us of that fact. Here Paul was writing about how he longed to go to Rome to preach the Gospel there. Little did he know that after getting to Jerusalem, he would be arrested and taken as a prisoner to Rome. Yet, God accomplished his purpose through Paul’s arrest. At the end of the book of Acts, we read of Paul “boldly and without hindrance” preaching the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ in Rome.
I wonder: are there circumstances in our lives that we have difficulty accepting? We need to remember and be encouraged by the fact that God can use everything, even the painful things of life that happen to us, to accomplish his good purposes. Paul talks about this in Romans 8.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who was executed by the Nazis because of his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer once wrote…
We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God. God will be constantly crossing our paths and canceling our plans…sending us people with claims and petitions…It is a strange fact that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God’s “crooked yet straight path.”
How do we react to God’s interruptions in our lives? We can learn much from Paul and from this letter about that subject.
So, we see in this letter the themes of the good news about Jesus and the sovereignty of God, but there is one theme even more dominant. It is the theme of the righteousness of God. We will talk more about that in a moment…
STRUCTURE
Here is how the theme of righteousness plays out throughout Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome…
- Introduction and Theme: Righteousness from God (1:1-17)
- The Unrighteousness of Humanity (1:18-3:20)
- Righteousness Imputed: Justification (3:21-5:21)
- Righteousness Imparted: Sanctification (6:1-8:39)
- God’s Righteousness Vindicated (9:1-11:36)
- Righteousness Practiced (12:1-15:13)
- Conclusion, Commendation, and Greetings (15:14-16:27)
KEY CONCEPT: RIGHTEOUSNESS
The Key Concept of Paul’s Letter to the Church at Rome is the idea of a righteousness from God that is revealed in the Gospel. The theme of Romans is not simply God’s righteousness or holiness in and of itself, but the righteousness that God gives to us as his gift.
In 1515 a German professor of theology was overtaken by a spiritual crisis…
Like everybody else in medieval Christendom, Martin Luther had been brought up in the fear of God, death, judgment and hell. Because the surest way to gain heaven (it was thought) was to become a monk, in 1505 at the age of twenty-one he entered the Augustinian cloister at Erfuhrt, where he prayed and fasted, sometimes for days on end, and adopted other extreme austerities. “I was a good monk,” he wrote later. “If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.” Luther probed every resource of contemporary Catholicism for assuaging the anguish of a spirit alienated from God. But nothing pacified his tormented conscience until, having been appointed Professor of Bible at Wittenberg University, he studied and expounded first the Psalms and then Romans. At first he was angry with God, he later confessed, because he seemed to him more a terrifying judge than a merciful saviour. Where might he find a gracious God? What could Paul mean in Romans 1:17 when he stated that “the righteousness of God was revealed in the gospel”? Luther tells us how his dilemma was resolved:
“I had greatly longed to understand Paul’s letter to the Romans, and nothing stood in the way but that one expression ‘the righteousness of God’, because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby God is righteous and acts righteously in punishing the unrighteous… Night and day I pondered until… I grasped the truth that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. 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 and whereas before ‘the righteousness of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gateway into heaven.”[2]
It is interesting to me to note how Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome has affected the lives of so many important people down through history. Luther was just one of these. Another was Augustine, born on a small farm in what is now Algeria. During his turbulent youth he was both a slave of his sexual passions and the object of his mother Monica’s prayers. As a teacher of literature and rhetoric he moved from Carthage to Rome and then finally to Milan, where he came under the spell of Bishop Ambrose and his preaching. It was in Milan during the summer of 386 CE, when he was thirty-two years old, that Augustine walked into the garden one day and heard a child next door singing, “Take up and read, take up and read.” Augustine picked up his Bible that was nearby and he read Romans 13:13-14…
Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather, clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the flesh.
Yet another life transformed by Paul’s Letter to the Church at Rome was that of John Wesley, who had been very religious as a young man. In fact, Wesley was a leader of “The Holy Club” at Oxford. In 1735, John and his brother Charles sailed from England to Georgia as chaplains to the English settlers and missionaries to the Native Americans. Two years later they returned in profound disillusionment because they had been so unsuccessful in their mission. Then, on 24 May 1738, during a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, to which John Wesley had one “very unwillingly”, he turned from self-confidence to faith in Jesus Christ. At that Aldersgate meeting, they read Luther’s Preface to Romans. Wesley later wrote in his journal about listening to Luther’s Preface…
About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.[3]
If God worked great things through Luther, Augustine, and Wesley through reading Paul’s Letter to the Church at Rome, who knows what God might do through us and our reading of this great letter?
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