The Gospel of Justification

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Let's go and look right now at Romans chapter 1, where we're going to start in this book. It becomes basically the theme verse of the whole book, by the way. And it is Romans 1, we're going to read verse 14 through 17. I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome. 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 righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written the righteous shall live by faith. This passage has been called the gospel in a nutshell. I know most people think it's John 3, 16, the gospel in a nutshell, but this one probably is even more powerful. What? Yeah. And, you know, just as the acorn has the entire oak tree inside of it, there is so much to unpack in just those few verses today. When we unpack it, I'm hoping basically that gates of heaven open up before us. And you might go like, that's an odd way to say it. That's exactly the way that the founding person of the Reformation put it, Martin Luther. He discovered in this passage that we're looking at today what changed and started the Reformation, and that is the gospel. So he had struggled a long time with his understanding what the righteousness of God is, specifically that's mentioned in this passage. And he thought, you know, the righteousness of God is how God is right about everything, and he'd be right to judge me, right to condemn me, because I am not perfect, I'm not even close to perfect, I can't do anything that's great. And he was starting to try to figure out what that all meant, okay? And he really, really struggled with this passage. And then he finally had the breakthrough. It was called the Tower Experience. He writes about it because it happened in a tower, in a castle. And this is how he writes about it after the fact. He says, I greatly longed to understand Paul's epistle to the Romans, and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, the righteousness of God. Because I took it to mean the righteousness whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage me. Therefore, I did not love a just, angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had great yearning to know what he meant. Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the righteousness of God and the statement that the just shall live by faith. Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through 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 the most inexpressibly sweet and greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven. And that's kind of what I hope happens for all of us, that this becomes kind of that gate to heaven, and it breaks open for us. And for that, I think, to happen, I think there are three points we need to realize from this passage. The form that the gospel is, the content of the gospel, and the power of the gospel. First of all, the form. You know, all the way through this first part of the book of Romans, if you'd read the whole chapter and chapter two, you'd see this word gospel come up again and again, probably more times than anywhere else in the book, and probably more times than anywhere else in the Bible, the word gospel. And we hear gospel all the time today. That's the gospel truth, and this is the gospel. But what does the word gospel actually mean? Well, if we look at the Greek word itself, it is euangelion. And I know you're not maybe used to Greek words, but the first part of it, eu, is kind of the preposition that means true, or right, or good, actually. The word eu means good. And angelion, you can almost hear angel, angel, message, messenger. Because angels, whether they were spiritual beings or whatever, it was just a messenger, someone who carried the message. And this word euangelion, well, it's good news. Believe it or not, the word euangelion was all about the media in Paul's day. The media. Because in that day and age, how did word get out? How did words get around? Even though there was writing, it's not like they had mass publishing. No newspapers to pass it all over the place. They didn't have Instagram, no TikTok, no radio, no broadcast. You know what they had? So let's say a king in his battle, or a general has a battle. In fact, there was one at one ...