Not Ashamed: Paul’s Letter to the Romans

In the regenerated work of the Holy Spirit, there's a blindness taken away from us that could only be done as a sovereign work of God, but it is also true that the life can hardly be lived correctly if the mind is not properly informed.

And so truth is so important. The Book of Romans, sometimes called the Apostle Paul's Magnum Opus. It's a portion of scripture that has been used significantly in the history of the church. It was while studying Romans that Martin Luther rediscovered the gospel, which fueled the Reformation. Countless Christians have come to faith after hearing the bad news and the good news contained in this single letter, and it's this book that we'll be studying this week on Renewing Your Mind. Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and a couple of weeks ago, Ligonier Ministries was in Canada for a conference, and while there I had the opportunity to sit down with the chairman of our board and the teacher behind a new series that we have just released, Not Ashamed, Paul's Letter to the Romans. Before you hear that conversation, this week you can also request this new series on DVD for a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. I'm thrilled that we have this new study of Romans, and I really enjoyed my time discussing it with Dr. Godfrey.

So here's that conversation now. Well, Dr. Godfrey, it is great to have you here on Renewing Your Mind, and we're recording at Ligonier's Ontario Conference, so people will be able to hear noise in the background as we're here in the bookstore in the podcast studio. But it's a delight to be able to talk with you about your new series, Not Ashamed, taking us through the book of Romans. Yes. Well, I'm delighted to be here.

It's wonderful to be back in Canada. Now, Romans is a significant book. The Lord used it greatly during the Reformation in the life of Luther. Calvin has commentaries on it. Martyn Lloyd-Jones preached hundreds of sermons through it. Why another study on Romans?

That is the pressing question of the hour. When I started my study, I was encouraged to look at the beginning of Calvin's commentary on Romans. He only has one commentary on Romans. And Calvin begins his commentary by saying, why do we need another commentary on Romans? Philip Melanchthon had already written a long commentary, and Martin Butzer had already written a long commentary. And you might think if Calvin 500 years ago asked, why do we need another commentary?

It's a good question for you to ask. And I would give a similar answer to the one that Calvin gave. Calvin said we need a brief and lucid commentary.

He felt the earlier commentaries were too long. I'm not suggesting anybody's commentary is too long, but I thought a study that would move fairly rapidly through Romans would help people see the coherence of the book, which, you know, if you have a teaching that takes a long time to get through a book, you learn a great deal, but you've forgotten the beginning by the time you get to the end. So, this is to try to help people see that Paul was really writing a letter. He was very purposeful in what he was doing.

And I'm hoping people will see how the pieces fit together more clearly than sometimes comes through. Now, Romans is often regarded as one of the most important theological texts in the New Testament. What is it about Romans that sets it apart from the other books of the New Testament?

Well, that's a great question because actually what I set out to do is to try to prove exactly the opposite. I was concerned that too many people treat Romans as a kind of mini-systematic theology, as if Paul, having written practical letters to other people, now said, let me write a systematic theology to you, Romans. And I don't think that's what he did. Obviously, it's a letter with a great deal of theology. It's a letter with very important theology. But, like all of Paul's letters, what he's chosen to write is directed to specific issues in the lives of the people to whom he's writing. So, I wanted to try to bring that out more than is usually brought out, I think, that Paul is not sitting back. And even in the topics that he addresses, trying to be exhaustive on those topics, he's molding his teaching to issues in the Roman church.

And so, I try to highlight that as I go along. Well, could you set some of that context? What was he addressing to that church? Well, I think, especially when you read the first three chapters in particular, you see just below the surface, sometimes on the surface, that there are questions that have been raised in the minds of Roman Christians about Paul. We're all so pious that we love Paul, we think highly of Paul, we agree with Paul. We don't have questions about Paul, but these Romans had a lot of questions about Paul.

Why has he never visited us? Is his gospel of grace over the top? Is he saying, let us in, that grace may abound? Does he really understand the unique place of Jews in God's redemptive history?

Does he understand the Old Testament? I think these are all questions just below the surface of what Paul is trying to correct in the minds of the Roman Christians. And because the questions that the Romans had were significantly theological and about the mission and the preaching of Paul, he goes into theology in a very profound and helpful way, but answering those concerns of the Roman Christians.

You've talked about some of the context to help us understand Romans. Does the structure of the letter also help us understand what Paul is trying to say? Absolutely, and I think that can be another problem with the way we tend to read the Scripture, that we go so slow that we see pieces in isolation. I kind of like the way this conference is being structured because we're going rather quickly through chapter five of Matthew so that we can see a little more of the coherence of the chapter than we sometimes do.

And it's the same way with the book of Romans. I think the structure is very important, very deliberate, and so I try to highlight ways in which the structure illuminates the meaning as we go along. We're always looking for the meaning, but there are various ways of getting at the meaning. Could you give us a sneak peek, perhaps, into how the structure helps us understand what Paul is saying?

Well, one of the things I enjoyed coming to that I don't think I've seen commentators talk about is questions. What many interpreters of Romans have said is a major question, is how do we understand chapter seven, where Paul talks about the good that he would, he does not, and the evil that he would not, that he does. And in the history of interpretation, there's been a long debate about whether that's Paul speaking as a Christian or Paul looking back on his pre-Christian experience, so there's been a lot of debate about that. And I think if you see, as I try to do in the teaching series, how chapters six, seven, and eight relate to one another, then I think that interpretive question of chapter seven is solved more easily, because I think the beginning of chapter six sets up the questions that the rest of six, seven, and eight answer.

And when you see the questions at the beginning of six being answered as you go along, it becomes clearer what Paul means by what he's saying. Are there any practical implications if you interpret chapter seven differently? Yeah, I think classically the two interpretations are what's been called Calvin's interpretation, which is that Paul is speaking as a Christian, or the Arminian interpretation, Paul speaking as an unbeliever. For those of us who are Calvinists, that sort of prejudices the outcome of how we read the chapter. If you take the Arminian approach, how does that shape the way you think the Christian life ought to be lived? Well, the complaint against Calvin's exegesis is that it causes the Christian to be too defeatist, too preoccupied with sin, not having enough sense of Christ's victory in the Christian's life. The Calvinist complaint against the Arminian interpretation is that it doesn't take sin seriously enough in the Christian life, and that the battle against sin really is much more severe than the Arminian sees it. And the way I approach it is that because chapters seven and eight complement each other, seven talks about the reality of the struggle against sin in the Christian life, but eight goes right on to talk then about the victory that Christians do attain in that struggle.

So that structure really does, I think, illumine the meaning of the text. Romans makes it very clear that we are saved by faith alone in Christ alone, and justification by faith alone. But as Christians, we're also called to live a life of righteousness and faithfulness. How are we to understand the relationship between salvation by faith alone and our call to live our lives faithfully in obedience to God? Well, the Reformers always talked about the double blessing of redemption, which is justification and sanctification. The blessing of justification is that we can have confidence that all of our sins are forgiven now, and so we have that confident, assured relationship to God. Sanctification says that we continue to live in a process through which we become more and more sanctified, more and more holy. And although that process in this life is never completed, yet we are making progress.

Maybe not steady progress, but progress. And it's important to see that the New Testament balances those two things and stresses the importance of each of those things. So the relationship between the two is important, and the presence of both in the Christian life is vital. Paul says in Romans 10-12, How does a verse like that help us think about the nature of the church, the unity of the church? Right, I think this is Paul responding to some of the questions that the Roman Christians had been raising. And what Paul is saying is that in that section of Romans 9-11, he's saying that God certainly did choose the Jews and work through the Jews, both according to his electing purpose and to his covenantal historical purposes. But that today, with the coming of Christ, that wall of division between Jews and Gentiles has been broken down. Ephesians 2 is another place where he addresses that with some care. And that because of what Christ has done, now Jews and Gentiles are equal in the Church of Christ.

And the way he puts that is interesting. It's not so much that Jews have lost their favored status. It's that Gentiles are now included with Jews in that favored status. So, as I say, he says it briefly and clearly in Ephesians 2, where he talks about Gentiles now having once been alienated from the covenants of Israel, implicitly are now united with the covenants of Israel. So that's what he wants to stress there. And he wants to stress that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

Romans 12-2 is a verse that we're very fond of here on Renewing Your Mind. Really? Why would that be? It's where we get the name of the program. Yes. So we're told not to be conformed to this world, but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. What is that renewal? And is that a one-time event or is that a lifelong process? Well, in a certain sense, you could say it's both, that God is day by day constantly renewing our minds. And it's interesting that while the New Testament doesn't always establish an absolute sequence of mind and will or mind and life, there is a real light shown on the importance of the mind being informed correctly. The life can hardly be lived correctly if the mind is not properly informed. And so truth is so important and it's not all that there is to Christianity, but it's a very important part of Christianity. I always appreciated that Dr. Sproul would remind us that truth needs to go into the mind and then into the heart. And many Christians elevate feelings or their hearts that we need to be engaged with our minds. Or Dr. Sproul I think once said, Christians think we're to be thinking people. Right. There was a t-shirt in California, and you can see almost anything on t-shirts in California, that said, think less, live more.

And I thought how tragically wrong that is. Think more, live more is what we really ought to say. Paul also tells us that we are to live peaceably, if at all possible. And as he calls us to pursue peace, how do we do that? How do we live peaceably with our neighbors, with governments, while at the same time standing firm and not compromising our convictions?

Again, I think Paul is probably saying that in relation to the critics he's facing in Rome, and trying to show, first of all, his own peaceable heart and spirit, and then trying to convince them to relate to him in the same way. And, you know, so much is a matter of our means of communication when we talk to people. If we're going to be angry and belligerent, we're much more likely to get angry and belligerent back than if we try to speak calmly and reasonably, but still truthfully. And that's what we have to aim at, I think, especially at this time. I'm sure Canadians are all much nicer than Americans, I mean that sincerely, but there's an awful lot of anger in America today.

People really angry at each other across all sorts of divides, religious and political and all sorts of things. And I think part of being light in the world is for us to try to show a better way of relating to people and communicating without compromising the truth. And telling the truth is the most loving and kind thing. Oh, yes, absolutely.

But you can tell the truth in a way that is obnoxious, or you can tell the truth in a way that reflects some kindness and actual care for others. As we go about reading our Bible, sometimes we set out to read the entire Bible over the course of a year. When we get to lists of names, we can tend to kind of glaze over and maybe even skip past some of those verses. But in Romans, Paul dedicates almost an entire chapter calling out specific people by name. That must be significant, right?

Why does he do that? Well, I think it reminds us that every individual in God's family is important and never forgotten by God. I've thought at times that maybe the genealogies in the Old Testament were put there for the entertainment of the congregation as they listen to the minister try to read them rather unsuccessfully. In Paul's case, I have a theory that he puts all those names in so that at the end, all those Romans who were maybe sitting and thinking, what does he really know about us, have to confront the fact he knows a lot about you because he knows a lot of people in your church and he's been in communication with them. So I think Paul is sort of establishing credentials by showing, I know a lot about the Roman church. I've had a lot of contact, even though I've never been there.

And I think highly of the people I know there and so there. Well, does that teach us anything about the importance of friendship or community in the local church? Well, I think friendship and community in the local church is one of the crucial things that church exists for.

It can't be done online. It has to be done face to face, person to person. And yeah, I think that's really very important. It may also teach us that we should write letters. I was talking to Dr. Derek Thomas just earlier today, and we were talking about the subject of loneliness. And he said, essentially, the antidote to loneliness is join your local church and be an active member. There are friends as a community there.

Absolutely. And that's why I try to remind people in our church that while the gathered worship is critically important and central to who we are as a church, the other things we do is very important, too. We have coffee and cookies. And, you know, there are people who are counting how many cookies each child is taking.

And I'm thinking this is all good. Let the children have a happy memory of church with a nice sugar high every Sabbath day. Do you have a favorite verse or two from the Book of Romans? Well, I really love that verse.

Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. A quotation from Joel in the section Romans 9 through 11, Paul quotes over 30 verses from the Old Testament and just those three chapters to show he really does know what the Old Testament is all about. We began this conversation with me essentially asking why another study on Romans.

And I do want to say I'm glad that you did this study. And I think it would be really helpful for the church. But from your perspective, what do you hope that people will walk away with when they walk through this series and walk through Romans with you? I hope they'll walk away with a sense of how the letter fits together. I hope they'll walk away with a sense that seeing the structure of the book really illumines passages they've known but now have a deeper understanding of.

But most of all, I guess I hope they'll walk away with a sense that theology really is practical, that everything Paul is saying in this letter is intended to help Christians understand the truth better and live for Christ more fully. Well, Dr. Godfrey, it's always a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for your time today. Thank you.

Great to be here with you. And that's really our hope with every episode of Renewing Your Mind, that as your mind is renewed according to the truth, your life would be further transformed as you live for Christ more fully. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was a conversation I had with W. Robert Godfrey only a couple of weeks ago while we were both at a conference in Ontario, Canada. If you'd like to own your own copy of this brand new 23-message study through Romans, request your copy with a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800-435-4343. You'll also have access to the digital study guide so that you can dig even deeper into the truths and gospel sweetness of Romans.

Visit renewingyourmind.org today. And here's a taste of what you'll hear later this week from Dr. Godfrey's new series, Not Ashamed. What Paul is going to be showing all along is that his ministry is fulfilling Old Testament prophecy. He's not forgotten his roots at all. He always remembers his roots and is pursuing what God has appointed him to do. Another criticism, implicit, is that Paul has forgotten the advantages that God has given the Jews. We can see that suggested in Romans 3 verse 9 and 29 and Romans 9 verses 4 and 5, and Paul makes very clear that that's just not true. He hasn't forgotten the Jews. He hasn't forgotten the advantages given the Jews and that he understands precisely the role of Jews in God's saving purpose. We could almost say that a lot of Romans 2 through 5, Romans 7, Romans 9 through 11, Romans 14, are focused on questions about the role of Jews and the function of Jews in God's purpose. And in terms of advantages, Paul can speak very powerfully about recognizing the advantages that God has historically given the Jewish people.

Paul writes, then what advantage has the Jew or what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way to begin with the Jews who are entrusted with the oracles of God. That in Romans 3 verses 1 and 2.

And then he says in Romans 9, at the beginning of Romans 9, For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers and my kinsmen according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race according to the flesh is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. So, he's more than willing to grant the great gifts of God to the Jews in history. But he's also insistent that while the Jews have advantages, Jews and Gentiles are in the same position when it comes to the need for salvation and the reception of salvation.

And so he writes in Romans 3, what then? Are we Jews any better off? And again, you see if you listen carefully to what he's saying, are we Jews? He's writing to a largely Gentile church, and he's subtly reminding these Romans, Well, whatever concerns you have about the Jews, do try to bear in mind that I am one. So, if you Gentiles are concerned about the Jews, be sure that I as a Jew am concerned about the Jews. What then? Are we Jews any better off?

No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin. For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of law, or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since God is one, he will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith. So, Paul is willing to recognize advantages to the Jews, but he's insistent that when it comes to salvation, everyone is equally in need and everyone is saved in the same way, namely by faith. So, be sure to join us tomorrow as we begin this study of Romans here on Renewing Your Mind. Copyright © 2017 Mooji Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved. No part of this recording may be reproduced without Mooji Media Ltd.'s express consent.