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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Dr. Wes Bredenhof > Through apostles like Paul we've been blessed with the gospel of God | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) All songs are from the CanRC/FRCA Book of Praise Psalm 34:1-3 Psalm 32:1,2 (after the law of God) Psalm 118:1,5,6 Hymn 81 Psalm 79:5 Scripture reading: Acts 9:1-22 Text: Romans 1:1-7 |
Beloved congregation of Christ,
When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone? If we’re talking about a physical personal letter that you actually put in the mail, I imagine that for most of us it’s been some time. It’s probably been even more time if we’re talking about a hand-written letter. The art of letter-writing seems to be disappearing before our very eyes. Of course, we’re still communicating, we just don’t do it very much in that format anymore.
We’re beginning a new series here this morning on Romans. We think of Romans as a book of the Bible, but before it was that, it was a letter. It’s become one of the most famous and influential letters in the world. It’s arguable that the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s would not have happened without Romans. When Martin Luther studied Romans, the scales fell off his eyes and he saw the truth of God’s grace in our salvation. He’d never be the same and neither would the church.
As we go through this letter we’re going to plumb the depths of the most important teachings Christians need to know. We’ll be confronted with our greatest problem. We’ll be comforted with God’s great solution. We’ll be challenged with the call to holy living. All of those things are captured in the 16 chapters of this letter.
It begins this morning with what we call the address. If we ever write letters today, we would sign them off with our name at the end. The ancient practice was to identity the letter writer at the very beginning. So with Romans, we learn right away that the author was Paul. He describes himself as “a servant of Christ Jesus.” The footnote with “servant” in your ESV Bible will tell you that the word can also be translated as “slave.” Like the prophets of the Old Testament, Paul is a humbly submissive servant of God. He was called to be an apostle, one commissioned by Christ and sent out to represent him. Of course, Paul wasn’t the only apostle, but he was the apostle specifically to bring the gospel to non-Jewish people. People like us.
So I’ve summarized this morning’s sermon with this theme, Through apostles like Paul we’ve been blessed with the gospel of God.
We’ll consider the gospel and its:
1. Content
2. Foretelling
3. Spread
According to verse 1, what God set Paul apart for was the gospel, the gospel of God. The word “gospel” literally means “good news” or “glad tidings.” It is the good news of God, which is to say that it’s the good news which has its source in God. This good news was God’s idea, not man’s. It comes from above not from below.
That brings us to the question of what this good news is all about. Verse 3 tells us. It concerns God’s Son. Right away we’re reminded that our Saviour is the second person of the Holy Trinity. When the Bible teaches that he is God’s Son, it’s teaching us that he has always been God. Before anything was created, there was the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit living in eternal communion.
About 2000 years ago, God’s Son did something remarkable. He humbled himself by taking on a human nature. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary. He took his human nature from her. As such he was “descended from David according to the flesh” as it says in verse 3. He has a human ancestry tracing back to King David. King David was the Israelite King who lived about 1000 years before Christ. He gets mentioned here because of God’s promises to him for a Son who would be our Redeemer. We’re reminded that with Christ’s conception and birth, God was faithful to his promises.
Isn’t it interesting that Paul begins like this? He’s writing about the gospel and the first thing he mentions is the incarnation. The fact that the Son of God took on a human nature is foundational to the good news. Without Christmas there’s no gospel. That’s because we needed a true human being to die on the cross in our place. As our Heidelberg Catechism explains it, God wasn’t going to punish another creature for the sin which human beings committed. That would be unjust. It had to be a human being. So in his love, God took the incredible step of sending his beloved Son to take on a human nature, become one of us, and pay for our sin as our substitute. Praise God that he loved us so much that he did this for us!
The gospel says that the Son of God became a man and went to the cross and suffered and died in the place of all who believe in him. But verse 4 tells us that the gospel contains more good news. Jesus Christ our Lord was raised from the dead on the third day. He came back to life. When the Holy Spirit made that miracle happen, God was making a powerful declaration.
With the resurrection, God declared Jesus to be “the Son of God in power.” His life prior to and including the cross consisted of humiliation. He suffered and bore the curse of our sin throughout his life, but especially at the end. His power and glory were obscured by what he had to go through for our salvation. But that all changed with his resurrection. There God made clear what was true all along: Jesus was truly the Son of God in power. He is Almighty God, the one whom the grave could not hold. He is victorious over sin and death and because he’s victorious, so is everyone who believes in him.
Loved ones, if you have believed this gospel, then you have eternal life. If you have believed this gospel, God promises you that what’s said in verse 7 is true of you too: you are assuredly loved by God. You’ve been set apart by him to be one of his people. You’re assuredly a recipient of grace – in Christ you’ve received the opposite of what you deserve. Instead of receiving eternal death, in Christ you’ve been blessed with eternal life. And you have peace – peace with God, which is to say you have a healthy and whole relationship with him. That peace with God then also spills over into peaceful relationships with other people as well. All of these blessings belong to everyone who believes in this gospel. Do you believe it?
One of the incredible things about this good news is that it didn’t just fall out of the clear blue sky at Christmas in Bethlehem. No, according to verse 2, it had been foretold. God had promised it “beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures.” Let’s look closer at this foretelling.
Notice how Paul mentions “the holy Scriptures” in verse 2. That’s referring to what we call the Old Testament. Paul wrote this letter about AD 57. When it was written, there were only a few New Testament writings in existence. The Bible still consisted largely of the Old Testament.
Paul speaks about the prophets writing in the Old Testament. When we hear “prophets” we might be tempted to think only of men like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. But that would be too narrow a way of thinking about prophets here. The “prophets” here refers to all the authors of the Old Testament. All these men were instruments by which God revealed himself and his will, which is the definition of a prophet. We might think that a prophet was just some kind of person who predicted the future. But in the Bible, a prophet is someone who brings revelation from God. So, whether it was Moses, David, Samuel, Solomon, or any other Old Testament writer, they’re all God’s prophets because they brought his Word.
It was through these men and their writings that God promised the gospel beforehand. There are those who have a negative attitude towards the Old Testament. They view the Old Testament as outdated and irrelevant for Christians. It’s really the New Testament that we need to focus our attention on. They may speak of the need for Christians to “unhitch themselves from the Old Testament.” Based on what we read here in verse 2, if Paul were alive today, he’d want to have a word with such people.
He’d tell them that the holy Scriptures of the Old Testament are valuable because they already contain the gospel, promised beforehand through the prophets. The good news gets unfolded through promises made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. The good news gets unfolded through the Exodus from Egypt, the greatest deliverance event of the Old Testament. It gets unfolded through God’s other works of salvation too, like when God miraculously delivered his people by leading the people of Moab, Ammon, and Edom to destroy one another. That happened during the days of King Jehoshaphat and it’s described in 2 Chronicles 20. Of course, the gospel was also foretold and promised beforehand through the men we typically think of as prophets. We think of Isaiah, how he prophesied of Immanuel in chapter 7 of his prophecy, how he prophesied of the Prince of Peace in chapter 9, the root of Jesse in chapter 11, and the suffering servant in chapter 53. Throughout the Old Testament, we find the gospel being promised beforehand. You see, it’s not only through the apostles that we’ve been blessed with the gospel, but also the Old Testament prophets.
Loved ones, this is important for us to realize for a couple of reasons. First, and most obviously, we shouldn’t be negative towards or ignore the Old Testament. There’s much for us to learn there about the gospel and about how God is always faithful to his people. Second, closely connected to that, what we read here in verse 2 reminds us how to read the Old Testament as Christians. When we read the Old Testament, there’s the temptation to look at it merely as a collection of examples. Be like David here, don’t be like Saul there. Dare to be a Daniel, etc. Paul’s writings elsewhere in the New Testament tell us that there is room for that kind of approach. But we shouldn’t stop there. Perhaps we shouldn’t even start there. Given what it says here in verse 2, we need to remember to look at the Old Testament as writings where God is busy doing something. In the Old Testament, God is pointing forward to the gospel concerning his Son. So when we study any passage of the Old Testament, it’s important to take that kind of approach. Ask yourself, “How is God here in this passage promising the gospel beforehand? How is he pointing us ahead to Christ?” When you take that kind of approach, it puts God first and by doing that, you honour him. You also honour him, because when you see those things you’re led to worship him for being faithful to his promises.
Last of all, let’s look at what our text says about the spread of the gospel. In verse 5, Paul says that it was through Christ that he received “grace and apostleship.” That could also be translated, “the gift of apostleship.” It was a gift for Paul to become an apostle. Moreover, it was a gift he didn’t deserve, he actually deserved the opposite.
Think of what we read from Acts 9. There he was known as Saul of Tarsus. Also then he was an apostle, but a very different kind. He was an apostle of the Jewish religious leaders in Jerusalem, sent to arrest Christians in Damascus and have them killed. He was an apostle of death and that would have led to his own eternal death. According to his own description in 1 Timothy 1, Paul at that time was a “blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent.”
Then amazingly, Christ confronted him on that road to Damascus. Christ sent his Holy Spirit and converted him. He not only turned him into one of his disciples, he gave him the gift of apostleship. In Acts 9, the Lord Jesus said to Ananias that Paul would be a “chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel.” In Galatians 1, Paul says that God had indeed commissioned him to preach Christ amongst the Gentiles as an apostle.
So, in verse 1 of our text, Paul says he was “called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.” He was called by Christ to this office of apostle. Now let’s just pause here for a minute and consider what an apostle is.
First of all, there’s a difference between a disciple and an apostle. All apostles are disciples, but not all disciples are apostles [repeat]. The eleven closest disciples of Jesus who were there after his resurrection became apostles. But there were many other disciples who didn’t become apostles. You see, a disciple is another name for a Christian. A disciple is someone who follows Christ as their Lord and Master, which is what a Christian does. All Christians are disciples, but not all Christians are apostles.
So then what is an apostle? There are two key characteristics of an apostle according to the New Testament. The first is that he is a witness to the resurrection of Christ. He has seen the risen Lord with his own eyes. Paul saw the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, so he qualifies on this score. The second key characteristic of an apostle is the commission directly from Christ. There too, Paul qualified. Christ had set him apart to be one of his apostles, one of his authoritative representatives on earth.
I tell you these things because there are people today who claim to be apostles. It happens mostly in Pentecostalism. Sometimes you’ll see it advertised that Apostle so-and-so is going to be speaking and performing signs and wonders. Sometimes it’s a man, but many times such apostles are also women. Regardless of their gender, such people have not seen the risen Lord with their own eyes, and are therefore not qualified to be an apostle. They haven’t been commissioned by Christ himself. If you encounter someone claiming to be an apostle today, run away and have nothing to do with them. The office of apostle no longer exists today. Unlike the offices of minister, elder, and deacon, the office of apostle was meant for a limited time only.
Paul was numbered among those apostles in the first century. He was particularly set apart “to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all nations.” That’s in verse 6. “The obedience of faith” is an interesting expression. That’s referring to what happens when people hear the call of the gospel and they believe. They can be said to “obey the gospel,” they’ve obeyed the call of the gospel to believe in Christ. When that happens, it’s for the glory of Christ’s Name. Christ is made much of when people believe in him. When people believe in him, they show how Christ is impressive and valuable, that he is indeed “the pearl of great price.”
As I mentioned earlier, it was Paul’s special role to bring the gospel to all the nations. Yes, he preached to Jews as well, but his focus was on the non-Jewish peoples everywhere. For that reason, even though he hadn’t travelled to Rome at this point yet, he still believed it was his responsibility to write to them and encourage them as new Christians. Many of the people in the Roman church were Gentiles, so it only made sense that Paul would be the apostle to write to them and provide them with spiritual guidance.
The Roman Christians too had been “called to belong to Jesus Christ.” That expression reminds us of what our Heidelberg Catechism says in Lord’s Day 1. Our only comfort in life and in death is in belonging, body and soul, to our faithful Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Belonging to Christ was a good thing for the Romans, and it’s a good thing for us too. Having Jesus as your Saviour is awesome, and so is having him as your Lord, your Master and Owner. When you belong to him, you belong to someone who knows you inside out and backwards, and yet still loves you and rules your life. Even though you’ve given him every reason not to love you, not one of those reasons changed his mind. You belong to him through thick and thin. He’ll always love you and he’ll continue to guide your life.
That message somehow came to people in Rome before Paul got there. Now he was going to reinforce it for them. In God’s sovereign providence, that same message has reached us too, here nearly as far away from Rome as you can possibly get. God brought the gospel to us too through various people, now Paul is here in Romans to reinforce that gospel message we’ve heard and believed. Or perhaps for some of us here, Paul is here in Romans to explain the gospel that we haven’t yet heard or believed, calling us to hear and believe it for the first time.
Some have said that Romans is the greatest letter ever written. Its only competition might be the other letters of Paul, maybe the letters of Peter and John as well. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Paul wrote this incredible epistle that continues to be so profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. Martin Luther called Romans “the chief part of the New Testament.” He said it was “the purest gospel.” He said, “It is worthy not only that every Christian should know it word for word, by heart, but also that he should occupy himself with it every day, as the daily bread of the soul.” Obviously he was a big fan of Romans. I pray you will be too. AMEN.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father, thank you for Paul’s letter to the Romans. Thank you for revealing the gospel to us through this holy writing. We praise you for Christ your Son, whom you sent to take our human nature. Thank you that he became one of us so he could suffer and die in our place on the cross. We worship you for declaring him to be the Son of God in power when you raised him from the dead. With your Holy Spirit, please help all of us to rest and trust in this Saviour whom you’ve given in your love. Father, we also thank you for the Old Testament, for promising beforehand the gospel in those writings. As we read and study them, please illumine our minds with your Spirit so we would see you and your grace, love, and faithfulness revealed in the gospel. We’re also grateful for apostles like Paul and how they were your instruments to spread the gospel. We praise you that the gospel they spread continues to spread to this day, and that it eventually reached us too. Thank you that we too have been called to belong to Christ. Help us so we would never that calling for granted, but always cherish it.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Dr. Wes Bredenhof, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
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