Not Ashamed

Picture downtown Mansfield on a gray January afternoon. There’s snow piled along the curbs on Park Avenue, the wind is cutting across Central Park, and folks are hurrying from their cars with their collars turned up. Somebody is standing out there in the cold with an open Bible, preaching Jesus Christ. A few people slow down. Most don’t. A man walks past with his family and smirks, and a couple of teenagers laugh and hold up a phone. If you’re the one holding that Bible, you feel something rise up in your chest that has nothing to do with the weather.

Most of us will never preach on a street corner in the snow. But every one of you knows that feeling. It shows up in the break room on second shift when somebody mocks the Bible and every head turns to see what the church fella will say. It shows up at the family reunion and in the group text. The door is wide open to say a word about Christ, and something in us pulls back. We laugh along or change the subject, and we tell ourselves there’ll be a better time.

The apostle Paul was writing to Christians in Rome, the capital of the empire that crucified his Lord, the city where, as tradition tells us, he would one day be put to death. He had been whipped in synagogues, beaten with rods by Roman magistrates, and stoned and left for dead at Lystra. If any man ever had a reason to keep his mouth shut, it was Paul. Then he sits down and writes, “I am not ashamed of the gospel.” What did Paul know that we so easily forget?

Here it is in one sentence. The gospel is the very power of God to save everyone who believes, so we owe it to everyone and we have no reason to be ashamed of it.

So reads the infallible, the inerrant, the all-sufficient Word of the Living God.

When I first preached this, we had been working our way through the opening of Romans, and these verses are the hinge of the whole letter. Verses 16 and 17 are the theme of the epistle. Everything Paul writes from verse 18 on is, one way or another, unpacking these two verses. So we’re going to slow down and take them a phrase at a time.

Notice how Paul builds it. In verse 15 he says he’s eager to preach. Then he strings together three little words: for, for, for. Each one gives the reason behind the statement before it. He’s eager to preach, for he isn’t ashamed. He isn’t ashamed, for the gospel is God’s power. It’s God’s power to save, for in it God’s righteousness is revealed. It’s like digging down to bedrock. Every “for” takes you one layer deeper, until you hit the foundation the whole thing rests on.

So let’s begin where Paul begins, with a man who says he owes something to the whole world.

The Debt Paul Owed

“Under obligation.” If your Bible has footnotes, look at the bottom of the page. The word is literally debtor. Paul says, “I am a debtor.”

That’s a strange thing for him to say. Paul never borrowed a dime from a barbarian, and he didn’t owe the philosophers of Rome a thing. So where does the debt come from? Look back at verse 1. Paul was “set apart for the gospel of God.” Look at verse 5. Through Christ he “received grace and apostleship for the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles.” God put something in Paul’s hands that was meant for other people. When somebody hands you a thing that belongs to someone else, you’re in debt to that person until you deliver it.

Think about the mail carrier who runs your route. Say he’s got a letter in his bag with your name on it. Maybe it’s from the hospital, maybe it’s from your grandson overseas. That letter isn’t his. He doesn’t get to decide your driveway is too long or the snow is too deep to bother with, and he sure doesn’t get to open it, read it, and decide you wouldn’t like what it says. He owes it to you, and when he puts it in your box he’s only doing what he owes.

Folks, that’s Paul. He’s carrying mail from heaven, and it’s addressed to everybody.

Look at who’s on his route. “Both to Greeks and to barbarians.” The Greeks were the cultured people, the ones who spoke the language of learning. Barbarian was the word for everybody else. It came from the way foreign talk sounded to a Greek ear, just “bar-bar-bar,” so they called those folks barbarians. Then Paul adds, “both to the wise and to the foolish,” the educated man and the man who never learned to read. Put those two pairs together and you’ve covered the whole human race. Paul owed the gospel to the professor and the field hand, to the man in the big house on the hill and the man who hasn’t slept under a roof in a month.

Verse 15: “In this way, for my part, I am eager.” Notice that little phrase, for my part. As far as it was up to Paul, he was ready to go, and he’d been ready for years. Back in verse 13 he tells them he had often planned to come “(and have been prevented so far).” The door to Rome was in God’s hand, and Paul left it there. When he finally did get to Rome, he came in chains, and he preached anyway. That’s how the book of Acts ends.

One more thing in verse 15. Who is Paul eager to preach to? “To you also who are in Rome.” Go back to verse 7. These people are already “beloved of God” and “called as saints.” Paul wants to preach the gospel to saved people. Don’t you ever think you’ve outgrown the gospel, church. The good news that brings a sinner to Christ is the same good news that keeps a saint on his feet.

That eagerness never left him. Writing to the Corinthians, he put it this way:

You and I are debtors too, every one of us who knows the Lord. Paul was ready to preach the gospel in Rome, and we ought to be ready to preach that same gospel to the people we come into contact with. Somebody carried it to you. Maybe it was your mama, or a Sunday school teacher, or a buddy at work who wouldn’t quit inviting you to church. Somebody paid their debt, and you’re the proof of it. The letter is in your bag now.

So who’s on your route? I want you to think of a name. Maybe it’s the neighbor whose dog barks all night, or the cashier you see every week at the grocery store. Maybe it’s your grandson who quit coming to church when he went off to school, or the fellow at work who cusses every other word and thinks all Christians are hypocrites. You don’t get to pick only the Greeks, the ones who’d fit in nicely on our pew. You owe the barbarian too.

Paul owed the gospel to everybody, and he was eager to pay up. But eagerness has a way of drying up the first time somebody laughs at you. So what kept Paul going? Verse 16 gives us the first “for.”

The Shame Paul Refused

Think about where this letter was headed. Rome was the proudest city on earth. It had the legions, the roads, the money, and the emperor. Paul was carrying a message about a Jewish carpenter from a backwater province who had been executed on a Roman cross.

You have to understand what the cross meant to a Roman. Crucifixion was the most shameful death the empire could hand out, the death they saved for slaves and rebels. Respectable Romans didn’t even like to say the word out loud. So when Paul preached that a crucified man is Lord of all, it sounded like madness. Imagine somebody walking into the Statehouse in Columbus and announcing that a man who died in the electric chair is King of the universe. That’s about how it landed.

Paul knew exactly how it sounded. He told the Corinthians:

To the Jew it was an offense, and to the Greek it was a joke. Paul preached it anyway.

So what exactly is it Paul refuses to be ashamed of? “The gospel.” Back in verse 1 he called it “the gospel of God.” In verse 9 he calls it “the gospel of His Son.” Put those together. God is the author of the good news, and His Son is the subject of it. Verse 3 says the gospel is “concerning His Son.” It’s the news that Jesus Christ died for sinners, was buried, rose again the third day, and was seen alive by witnesses. Take Christ out of it and you don’t have a gospel left. That’s what we preach in our church, plain and simple: the gospel of God concerning His Son.

Mind you, Paul wasn’t saying this from a comfortable study. He’d been whipped in the synagogues, beaten with rods at Philippi, stoned at Lystra, jailed, shipwrecked, and run out of one town after another. None of that was hypothetical for him. Years later, sitting in a Roman prison and expecting to die, he wrote to Timothy:

There it is again: “I am not ashamed.” Paul said it on his way to Rome, and he was still saying it in a Roman dungeon at the end of his life. That conviction didn’t come and go with his moods. He held on to it to the end.

When Paul says “I am not ashamed,” he’s understating it on purpose. What he really means is that he glories in it. He said as much to the Galatians:

The very thing Rome was most ashamed of was the one thing Paul would boast in. He knew what his Lord had said about being ashamed:

That ought to settle it for every one of us.

Back to our text. Paul wasn’t ashamed, and we have no business being ashamed either. But I’m afraid the church in America has a lot to answer for here. For a long time now the pattern has been silence or compromise. Either we kept quiet, or we watered the message down until nobody could possibly be offended by it. Instead of dealing with the root of the problem, we spend our energy blaming somebody else. Let’s not blame the politicians or Hollywood when it’s the churches of this country that have grown cold.

We Americans are proud of a lot, and some of it rightly so. We came through the Great Depression, two world wars, and the Cold War. But there has been many a man who marched up into the heat of battle to defend his country’s honor and would not face the laugh of his friends for the honor of his Savior. There’s many a man who will wrap himself in the flag and never say one word about the gospel of Christ. Don’t get me wrong. I love America. But in our zeal for her, we’ve lost her.

Paul cared more about the gospel than about anybody’s nationality, language, or skin color, and of that gospel he was not ashamed.

So let me ask you plainly. Where are you ashamed?

Forget the street corner for a minute and think about Tuesday morning at work. Does anybody at your job know you’re a Christian? Have you worked beside somebody for five years and never once mentioned the Lord? Would your neighbors be surprised to see your car in a church parking lot on Sunday? When the talk at the supper table turns to religion and your brother-in-law starts in, do you go quiet?

Most of the time shame just looks like silence. Peter didn’t plan to deny the Lord. He just got scared in a courtyard and said what was easy. Every one of us has been there. I’m not writing this to beat anybody. But silence about Jesus Christ is a kind of shame, and the Lord takes it seriously.

Paul refused to be ashamed. But how? Was he just made of tougher stuff than the rest of us? Not at all. In a minute you’ll hear Paul admit he was scared. The second “for” in verse 16 tells us where his boldness came from, and it didn’t come from Paul.

The Power Paul Trusted

This is a verse that gets cut short all the time. How many times have you heard somebody quote it, “it is the power of God for salvation,” and stop right there? Keep reading. “To everyone who believes.” There’s the condition. The power of God to save comes to everyone who believes.

Look at that word power. Paul says the gospel is the power of God. It’s the same word he used back in verse 4, where Jesus Christ “was designated as the Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.” I want you to see this. The power in the gospel is resurrection power. The same power that walked Jesus Christ out of that tomb is at work when a sinner who is dead in his sins hears the gospel and believes.

It’s God’s power, too, and we don’t add a thing to it. Listen to Ephesians 2:

There was no way we could earn salvation. We were dead in our sins, and there was nothing we could do about it. Praise God, even the faith that receives Christ is His gift. Salvation is God’s work from start to finish, and nobody will ever stand in heaven and brag.

That cuts both ways, folks. You can’t save yourself. I can’t save you either, and neither can any other preacher. The church at Corinth had forgotten that. They were lining up behind their favorite preachers like fans behind a ball team:

If you’re trusting a preacher to save your soul, you have no hope. Paul wasn’t crucified for you, and neither was I.

Paul knew where the power was, and he kept himself out of the way:

Did you catch that? “In weakness and in fear and in much trembling.” Paul was scared. So being unashamed has nothing to do with feeling brave. Paul opened his mouth while he trembled, because he trusted God’s power more than his own nerve.

Mind you, Paul didn’t say God saves people through foolish preaching. There’s plenty of that around, and God doesn’t need any more of it. He said God is well-pleased to save through a message the world calls foolish.

Let me tell you about a fifteen-year-old boy in England. One Sunday morning in January of 1850 he set out for church in a snowstorm, and the snow got so bad he ducked into a little Primitive Methodist chapel in Colchester. There were maybe a dozen or fifteen people in the place. The preacher never showed up, snowed in most likely. So a thin fellow from the congregation, a shoemaker or a tailor or something of the sort, got up to preach. He couldn’t pronounce all his words right, and he didn’t have much to say. He took Isaiah 45:22 for his text and just kept going back to it, telling the people to look to Christ. After about ten minutes he ran out of things to say. So he looked straight at that boy sitting under the gallery and told him he looked miserable and would stay miserable unless he obeyed the text. Then he hollered at him to look to Jesus Christ. That boy looked, and he was saved that morning. His name was Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

God took a man who could barely put a sermon together and used him to save the man we call the prince of preachers. Spurgeon went on to preach to millions, and he preached the same thing that thin little man told him: look to Christ.

Then Paul says the gospel is “to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” Why the Jew first? Because God made His promises to Israel. Verse 2 says the gospel is what God “promised beforehand through His prophets in the holy Scriptures,” and verse 3 says Christ “was born of the seed of David according to the flesh.” Paul says it again in chapter 3:

That’s why, everywhere Paul went, he went to the synagogue first. God has not forgotten His covenant people, and He is not finished with Israel. We see that plainly when we get to chapter 11. But look at the next words: “and also to the Greek.” Nobody is shut out. It doesn’t matter what your background is or what color your skin is. It doesn’t matter what language you speak or what’s in your bank account. The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

Our duty as God’s people is to carry the gospel, and the saving belongs to God.

One man plants and another waters, but God gives the growth. So don’t you ever underestimate that conversation you had about the Lord with a stranger five years ago, even if it got cut short and you never saw him again. You don’t know who came along behind you and watered it. Be faithful, and God will give the increase.

That ought to make us bold. Some folks think believing God is sovereign in salvation will make a man quiet. If anything it ought to do the opposite, because the results were never on his shoulders to begin with. You can carry the gospel to the hardest man in Richland County, because if God can raise Jesus from the dead, He can raise that man too.

But hear the other side of it. God gives the growth where the seed gets sown.

There’s no getting around the law of sowing and reaping. Sow sparingly, and you’ll reap sparingly. That’s just a fact. You can’t be quiet about the gospel and then wonder why nobody’s visiting the church. You can’t keep still about the truths of God’s Word and then wonder why your neighborhood is as bad as it is.

So who have you written off? Who have you decided is too far gone or too hard-hearted to ever believe? Leave that call to God and sow the seed.

The gospel is the power of God to save. But save how? How does a holy God take a guilty sinner and declare him righteous without becoming unrighteous Himself? That’s the question the last “for” answers.

The Righteousness Paul Proclaimed

“For in it,” that is, in the gospel, “the righteousness of God is revealed.” Keep your finger right there and look down at verse 18: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” It’s the same word, revealed, one verse apart. God is showing the world two things. In the gospel He reveals a righteousness. From heaven He reveals His wrath. Every person reading this is going to stand under one or the other.

So what is this “righteousness of God”? It includes the fact that God Himself is righteous, and He surely is. But in the gospel God reveals a righteousness that comes from Him, a right standing He gives to sinners who have none of their own. Paul spells it out in chapter 3:

Look at the end of that. God is “just and the justifier.” He doesn’t wink at sin. He punished it, in full, on His Son. Because the debt has been paid, God can declare the believing sinner righteous and be perfectly just in doing it.

That’s the great exchange. Christ took my sin, and I get His righteousness.

Back to our text. “From faith to faith.” Folks have argued over that little phrase for a long time. I believe the plain sense is that this righteousness is received by faith from start to finish. It begins by faith and it goes on by faith. There’s never a point where you switch over to works and finish the job yourself.

Then Paul says, “as it is written,” and he quotes the prophet Habakkuk. Habakkuk had been complaining to God. Babylon was coming, a wicked and proud nation, and Habakkuk couldn’t understand why God would use people like that. God answered him:

There are two kinds of people in that verse. There’s the proud man, whose soul isn’t right, and there’s the righteous man, who lives by faith. Paul’s point is that this was never anything new. The righteous have always lived by faith. Abraham lived that way, and so did David and Habakkuk, and so do you if you’re in Christ.

About five hundred years ago there was a monk in Germany who hated this verse. Martin Luther had tried everything a man could try to get right with God. He fasted, he prayed for hours, and he confessed his sins until his confessor was worn out with him. When he read “the righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17, all he heard was bad news. To him it meant the righteousness by which God punishes sinners, and Luther knew he was a sinner. Later on he admitted he came to hate that phrase.

He kept pounding on this verse, day and night, until God opened his eyes. He saw that the righteousness of God revealed in the gospel is the righteousness God gives, the righteousness by which a merciful God justifies us through faith. “The righteous will live by faith.” Luther said it felt like he’d been born all over again and had walked through open gates into paradise.

I’m a Baptist, and Luther and I would part company on a good many things. But on this verse he saw clearly, and God used it to start a fire in Europe that’s still burning.

So what are you standing on? If you’re trusting in your church attendance, your baptism, your giving, or the fact that you’re a better man than your brother-in-law, you’re standing on your own righteousness, and it won’t hold you up.

If you’re a believer, quit trying to earn what God has already credited to your account. Some of you wake up at three in the morning with old sins rolling around in your head. When that happens, don’t answer with your track record. Answer with Romans 3:26. God is “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” That’s where you stand, and it doesn’t move on your bad days.

To Everyone Who Believes

Remember how Paul built this. Each “for” took us a layer deeper, so read it from the bottom up and it all falls into place. God has revealed a righteousness that guilty sinners can receive by faith. Because of that, the gospel is the very power of God to save everyone who believes, Jew and Greek alike. A man who believes that can’t stay ashamed of it, and a man who isn’t ashamed of it will be eager to pay what he owes.

That’s how Paul could walk into the proudest city on earth with a message about a crucified Jew. His confidence was in the message, because the power in it belonged to God.

If you have never trusted Christ, look at verses 17 and 18 one more time. Two things are revealed. In the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed for everyone who believes. From heaven, the wrath of God is revealed against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. There’s no third option. You will stand under one or the other. Remember the warning of Jesus in Mark 8:38. You can’t keep Christ at arm’s length now and expect Him to claim you in that day.

But hear the good news. Jesus Christ took the shame so that you wouldn’t have to. Rome stripped Him and nailed Him up outside the city as a public spectacle, the most shameful death a man could die, and He bore it willingly for sinners who deserved it. “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” The righteousness you could never earn, God gives to everyone who believes. The Savior who was not ashamed to bear your sin is a Savior you will never need to be ashamed to name.

Don’t stop reading at the word salvation. Read the rest of it: “to everyone who believes.” That’s for the Greek and the barbarian, the wise and the foolish, and it’s for you. Turn from your sin and trust Jesus Christ, and you will live by faith.

If you are in Christ, rest in this. Your standing before God rests on the righteousness of God credited to you by faith, and not on your courage or your consistency. Even on the days you were ashamed of Him, Christ did not let go of you.

Some of you are thinking, “Preacher, I’ve been unfaithful to the command of God, and I’ve lost so much time already.” Listen to what God told Israel through the prophet Joel:

That promise was made to Israel, about real locusts and real harvests, and God will keep it to Israel down to the last grain. But it shows you the heart of the God we serve. He is a God who restores. If He can pay back the years the locusts ate, can He not redeem the years you and I have wasted? He can.

So be faithful, starting now. It’s never too late. If you haven’t gotten started, get started. If you’ve been faithful, keep being faithful and help somebody along the way.

Here’s what I want you to do before the next Lord’s Day. Take that name you thought of earlier, the person on your route, and pray for them by name every day this week. Ask God for one open door, and when it comes, walk through it. Say one word about Jesus Christ to that person before Sunday comes again. You don’t have to preach them a sermon. Just don’t stay silent.