Gripped by the Gospel

What's the true message of the Gospel? Here's Stephen Davey with this brief summary of the Gospel message. It doesn't deliver a dose of self-help. It doesn't encourage you to pull up yourself by your bootstraps.

It doesn't say to do this work and that work. It says simply to admit you're sinful. Admit you're in need of a deliverer and you come to Jesus Christ as a beggar, offering Him nothing but depravity, nothing but sin, nothing but failure. And you receive from Him, in that admission, forgiveness and salvation. Have you ever been so captivated by a story or a piece of music that you just couldn't turn away? Sometimes certain moments or ideas come to life and can grip us like that. Today, we're going to talk about something that completely consumed the Apostle Paul.

It wasn't a book or a play or even a mission. It was the Gospel. In the midst of a world full of immorality and confusion, Paul boldly declared, I am not ashamed of the Gospel. What made Paul so unshakably confident and how can you tap into that same conviction in your own life? Keep listening to find out.

Here's Stephen. Have you ever read a book and then described to a friend? I was so gripped by that book, I had a hard time putting it down. Have you ever watched a movie or a play and found yourself utterly gripped by the unfolding drama? Have you ever listened to perhaps a musical score or a symphony and you haven't wanted to breathe, so mesmerized by the beauty of the score? There are certain things in life that can grip us. We tend to define life in terms of those things that captivate our thinking and control our thinking and our living, take our energy and involve our dreams. Perhaps you're in the grip even now of an assignment at school or some assignment at work. Perhaps you're building a home or you're starting a new job or business and that seems to dominate your thinking.

In fact, to have a conversation with you would ultimately and variably somehow include some discussion by you on that particular thing. Some of you are in the process of raising little children. I know in our own church family, Scott, our pastor of children, told me we had 30 babies born in the last 60 days here in our church.

Some of you it's one diaper pail after another and that's the chapter you're in. I can well remember the moment years ago when our twins were, I believe, a little less than one year old when my wife announced to me that she was unexpectedly expecting again. That was quite a moment. Whenever I'd leave the house for the office in those days I would leave behind a mother and three children under the age of two. I tried not to look too overjoyed as I would leave.

I'm so sorry I have to leave but, you know, I gotta work and that sort of thing. But we had a little ritual as we'd kiss goodbye I would say, honey, what are your plans for the day? And she would look at me and she'd say one word, survive.

Which she did wonderfully well I might add. Certain seasons of life tend to dominate our thinking, our energy, our dreaming, our time. Perhaps for some there is the dominating principle of life, some philosophy, some idea that so captivates you, some revolutionary thought that you follow it with all of your life. I read a few months ago in a book by Ravi Zacharias about the dominating energy and misguided passion in the life of Joseph Stalin. Ravi was in the home of Malcolm Muggeridge who was a journalist and he shared with Ravi about a time in the past when they were doing a documentary on the life of Joseph Stalin and he was involved and Stalin's daughter Svetlana Stalin stayed in Muggeridge's home for several days.

And he told Ravi Zacharias that on three occasions during her prolonged visit Svetlana talked about her father's death. Stalin, he wrote in his book, was a small man about five foot four and not very imposing but a man of steel. And by the way, Stalin is not his given name.

Stalin means steel and so he adopted that name. He, in his personal godless ambition, was passionate. His daughter, however, wanted to know if I, this is Muggeridge, could explain why her father had done something very peculiar on his deathbed, in fact something strange about the moment he died. She said that moments before he died he suddenly sat up in bed, he clenched his fists and shook them toward the heavens. Then he threw himself back on the pillow and died.

She asked, why did he do that? Muggeridge explained her father's hatred of God and his word. He had followed other leaders who constantly shook their fists throughout their lives as it were in the face of God. Stalin himself obliterated 15 million of his own people who refused the atheistic Communist Party line. And on his deathbed, the man who called himself steel, even there he shook his fist in the face of God and continued to reject the truth of heaven until it was eternally too late.

I think of another man who was also small of stature. He was gripped by and dominated by a liberating truth that consumed him. And if you, my friends, want to live with forever in mind, in fact if you want to know how to live now, Romans chapter 1 will give us, now in these few verses as we continue studying through, the main thesis of this letter, the main proposition as Paul delivers to us that life-changing, life-altering truth as he describes the Gospel and how to live by faith. Let's pick our study up there as Paul writes. For I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it, the Gospel that is, you could read it, for in the Gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, but the righteous man shall live by faith. Paul was consumed by the Gospel. Paul, to him, the Gospel was his life that was the passion in his heart. It was his every breath. And now in these two verses, he will spell out that passion.

He will give us the liberating truth of the Gospel that is to consume all of our lives as we live lives of faith for him. Now he began emphatically, we looked at it briefly last Lord's Day by saying, for I am not ashamed. Now why would he say that? I believe what one author suggested that he would say that because the Roman believers would be prone to wonder if he was going to be ashamed. And so he said it sort of like you might say to somebody, now listen, I'm going to tell you the truth. Now why do you say that, because you lie all the time?

No, because maybe it's a situation where you might be tempted to lie or it's a situation where you're going to say something that they may have a hard time believing and so you proceed it by saying, I'm telling you the truth. So Paul here, as it were, expects them to anticipate that he would be ashamed, perhaps. He was intimidated, we learned in Corinth, in other passages. Perhaps they assumed that he would be ashamed here and so he begins by telling them, listen, of all the places in the world to be intimidated of the Gospel, of all the places to be ashamed and silenced as it relates to the Gospel, who will be Roman?

I want you to know, I am not ashamed of the Gospel. The Gospel would meet its greatest religious test in Rome. It would meet its greatest political test in Rome with its paganism.

The Gospel would meet its greatest moral test in Rome and he wasn't ashamed. The Romans believed that Zeus was the creator and giver of life. They believed that Zeus miraculously caused the birth of his son Dionysius and when Dionysius was killed by the Titans, who were lesser gods, Zeus in anger incinerated the Titans and from their ashes created the human race. Dionysius, the son of Zeus, would come to become known as the god of celebration, the god of revelry, the god of wine. In fact, an entire religious system dominated the Roman mind and the Greek mind around the time of Paul with its belief in Dionysius, who was in reality the god of revelry and the god of drunkenness and all sorts of perversions. It's interesting, I was listening to the radio and listening to one particular preacher, John MacArthur, preaching on this very thing and so I went back to my study, pulled his manuscript off the web, it's a wonderful tool, and then had some things that I could quote here.

He did a lot of the research. The worshippers of Dionysius, he wrote in his manuscript, committed atrocities with human organs. They engaged in orgies of sexual perversions along with music and dancing and feasting. They built the great temples of Dionysius where they carried on their orgies in the very center of the temple in Damascus, which was excavated, whose ruins can still be seen to this day. There is a decorated area in the center of a large room that includes a deep pit.

The hole was built and beautifully decorated, but it was for nothing less than a place where the drunken worshippers could come from their feasting and revelry and literally vomit as if they were offering a sacrifice to their god of wine and they would then return to indulge themselves all over again. What do you bring to a world like that? What do you bring to a world that is filled with utter wickedness and depravity, a world where worship involves sexual perversion, a world where drunkenness is encouraged, a world where the gods even are as lustful and aimless in their pursuits as human beings, a world obsessed with its evil desires? What do you bring to a world like that?

The same thing you bring to a world like that today. You bring the gospel. And you declare that the gospel's creator first and foremost is God.

The gospel's creator is God. That is, the gospel is spiritual. It isn't fleshly. It isn't lustful. It doesn't pamper to sin. It is holy and pure. Paul also already, as you know, discussed this truth when he wrote earlier in chapter 1 that this gospel was of God. That is, it was sourced in God.

It came from God. And this gospel concerned the Son, we read, who was born of a descendant of David according to the flesh, who was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead. We have also learned that Jesus Christ is Lord by virtue of his powerful resurrection. No Roman God had any truly good news for humanity.

There wasn't any good news. The gods of Greece and Rome seemed to be as lost and as wandering and as wicked and as uncertain as humanity. But this God, this true and living God, had a euangelion.

He had a good news. He had a gospel to deliver to humanity. The gospel might be intimidating. The gospel might be offensive.

It might be considered foolishness to the world, but to the one who is sick of sin, to the one who is laden down with guilt, to the one who knows there must be something more to life than self and the pursuits of self. The gospel is good news of sin washed away. It is good news of guilt pardoned and removed. It is good news of sin, though it is stained as scarlet. The heart can be made as white as wool.

This is good news. And it came from the true and living God who created it. The gospel's character, secondly, is power. That is, the gospel is operational. Paul wrote, for I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power, the dunamis. That's the Greek word that gives us our word dynamite or dynamic. This is the dynamite of God.

I like that. This is the dynamic of God, the gospel. Now, would you note carefully he did not say that the gospel contains a little power. He did not say that the gospel needs to be accompanied by signs of power, which is a popular theology today. He did not say that the gospel talks about power.

If you notice, he says the gospel is power. And though the world considers it foolishness, it is in fact the power of God by which he transforms men and women, pulling them from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1.18, that the word of the cross is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to those of us who believe it is the power of God. Peter wrote in 1 Peter 2.9 along that same line, this powerful God chose you, you are his peculiar possession, and now you can share forth the praises of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

No wonder the Thessalonians, after hearing the gospel, the good news, the text tells us in 1 Thessalonians 1, verses 9 and 10, that they turned from their idols, they turned from Dionysus, they turned from Zeus, they turned from Jupiter, those false gods that had no good news, and they turned to the true and living God, and they waited for the sun to appear from heaven. That is the power of the gospel, to take people from this into this kingdom of light. The gospel's confrontation, third, is that it calls mankind from sin then unto salvation. That is, the gospel is not only spiritual, it is not only operational, but it is transformational. The gospel, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, is not a self-help process. It is in three steps to feel better about yourself, your self-image.

It is in nine ways to feel better about the world. No, the gospel confronts the unbeliever with depravity and sin and calls him to salvation. Now, the terms salvation, being saved, getting saved, are considered by a society that believes itself to be cultured and sophisticated, to be being rather droll and unsophisticated and common and ludicrous. What do you mean I need to be saved, I've heard people say to me.

What do you need? I need to get saved. What do you mean I need to fear the judgment of God? What do you mean I'm depraved or I'm a sinner? What do you mean that I'm in jeopardy of landing in hell? Now, look, you can talk to me about turning over a new leaf or getting religious.

You can talk to me about being nicer to people on the freeway, but don't talk to me about depravity and sin and judgment and heaven and hell. That isn't for cultured people. That is the gospel. The first century would mock Christianity for the same thing. The idea of sinful humanity being potentially rescued by a god who voluntarily sacrificed himself for them was ludicrous to their minds.

Archaeologists digging among the ancient ruins of Rome uncovered a mural, and after they got all of the dirt and silt away, they discovered that it was blasphemous against the god we believe and worship. It depicted a common slave. That was their view of Christians, common people, unlettered, uncultured. But it depicted a common slave bowing down before a cross with a donkey hanging on it.

And the caption read, Alex Samenos worships his god. Christianity was the belief of fools. One writer named Celsus wrote a letter in and around the time of Paul in which he said, Let no cultured person draw near, none wise, none sensible.

But if any is wanting in sense and culture that is lacking in sense and culture, if any is a fool, let him come to Christianity. Celsus continued, he compared Christians to a swarm of bats. He compared Christians to ants crawling out of their nests. He compared Christians to frogs holding a meeting in the swamp and to worms crawling around in the mud.

What is at the heart of this mockery? I'll tell you, it is the confrontation of the gospel that calls mankind sinful and in desperate need of salvation. That's the word he uses here. The word soteria in Romans 1.16 translated salvation. Paul will use the noun many times, some 19 or 20 times in his letters.

He'll use it five times in the letter to the Romans. The word salvation speaks of being rescued from danger. It speaks of deliverance from the penalty of sin. It speaks of being rescued from eternal death and separation from God. Salvation, my friends, is not a term we came up with. Being saved is not a term we created. It is a divinely inspired phrase delivered in and through the writings of men like Paul who put them into the text of scripture. The salvation of God, in fact, as it was first delivered in the very first sermon of this dispensation of grace with the church age was by Peter in Acts chapter 2. And he, we are told, stood and he solemnly, the text says, testified and continually exhorted his audience saying, be saved from this perverse generation. Any true preacher, my friends, that is true to the gospel, any true preacher that is true to God and the word of God will be saying, in effect, the same thing 2,000 years later that he said then, be saved from this perverted generation. That is the gospel.

No wonder it is brought into derision. In Matthew 18 and 11, we're told that Jesus Christ has come to seek and to save that which was what? Lost. The gospel is for lost people. In fact, the angel delivering a message to Joseph that Jesus would be born to Mary, comforting the mind of Joseph as he considered putting Mary away privately. The angel told him that she would bear a son and his name would be called Yeshua, Jesus' deliverer.

Why? Because he would save his people from their, what? Sins. So the gospel has to do with people who are lost and who are sinners.

Can't be any clearer than that. Paul repeated in 1 Timothy 1 15, it is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. That's why the world doesn't like the gospel. It's offensive. It's confrontational. It doesn't deliver a dose of self-help. It doesn't encourage you to pull up yourself by your bootstraps.

It doesn't say to do this work and that work. It says simply to admit you're sinful. Admit you're in need of rescuing. Admit you're in need of a deliverer and you come to Jesus Christ as a beggar, offering him nothing but depravity, nothing but sin, nothing but failure. Receive from him in that admission forgiveness and salvation.

The gospel is confrontational. You know when you're driving your car along the road and you see a sign that says slow down? Curve ahead.

You might even draw one of those little squiggly lines. You can do one of three things in relation to that sign. You can receive the message of that sign by immediately believing it and slowing down. You accept it as truth. Or, instead of receiving the message, you can reject the message. You can say something like, why do they keep putting these signs along this mountainous highway?

Don't they have anything better to do with their lives? And you just maintain your current rate of speed. You can do another thing. Not only could you believe it or reject it, you could rebel against it. You could get to that sign and see it and say, oh, I don't believe it. In fact, I'm going to speed up.

I'll show that sign. And that is the response to the gospel message. The truth remains, by the way, regardless of what you do in your car.

The truth remains regardless of what you do with this gospel message. You can believe it. You can ignore it. You can reject it.

You can even rebel against it. My friend, I'm here today to ask you a question. Are you saved? Have you come at some point in your life where you've thrown away your baptism and your good works and your church membership and your philanthropy and your good morals and you have said to Christ, oh, nothing in my hand I bring. Simply to thy cross I cling.

I am nothing but a sinner deserving of your judgment. But, oh, Lamb of God. I love the way the old hymn writer put it as he talked about the call. And he said, just as I am, without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me and that thou bittest me come to thee, oh, Lamb of God.

I come. Was there a point in your life when you came? Have you been saved? This is the call of the gospel. And I am here to confront you today as a signpost that simply reminds you that to believe is salvation and that to disbelieve means not that you will be lost one day but that you will remain lost.

And the darkness you choose today will be given to you as your eternal gift for you will one day reside in eternal darkness. Someone in Rome might have asked, is this salvation for me too? You don't know what I've done, Paul.

You don't know how hopeless I am sure I am. Well, Paul goes on to give them the gospel call. The gospel's call is universal.

He wrote two very important words in verse 16. The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone. Now he will clarify in the next phrase with the condition of the gospel, but for now the gospel is delivered to everyone. And have you caught already the passion of Paul who in Romans chapter 1 verse 14 says, I am deeply indebted.

Do you remember that? I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise, the educated, and the unlearned. I am deeply indebted to deliver to them the gospel. Paul is in effect saying, I don't know if anybody will believe, but I believe everybody ought to hear. And that is the unlimited universal call of the gospel. That is why we are impassioned with that missions enterprise, not only here but around the world, because we believe what Paul said, that faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, but how shall they hear without a preacher, a messenger, a missionary, a neighbor, a teacher, a student. We don't know if everybody will believe. In fact the Bible indicates everybody won't.

But we believe everybody ought to hear. And that was the passion of Paul. The gospel is a call to everyone. For God so loved the what?

The world that he gave his only son. The Bible says in Acts 2 21, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Revelation 22 17, let him who hears say, come. Whoever is thirsty, let him come. Whoever wishes, let him take of the free gift of the water of life.

The invitation is to the world. Salvation is an invitation to everybody, but it is granted only to those who rely upon Christ alone for salvation in the finished work of Christ. You know, as I've said before, Paul is one who never completely recovered from his salvation. Never got over it. Gripped by this life-altering, life-consuming, life-challenging good news. You never get over that when you're gripped by the gospel.

That was Stephen Davey, and this is Wisdom for the Heart. Stephen called this message, Gripped by the Gospel. The gospel gripped Paul's heart, and it can grip yours too. It transforms your past, gives purpose to your present, and fills you with confidence for the future.

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