1. “The Gospel of God” (Romans 1, Part 1)

What does it mean to be a Christian?

It seems to me that there’s currently quite a bit of confusion on how to answer that question.

• In the past, people might have connected Christianity to being part of a Christian church. But in our day more than half of people who identify themselves as Christians in America do not attend church even once a month.
• Some might speak of how Christianity involves a specific way of life in obedience to the Bible; but right now more than half of the people who identify themselves as Christians reject the Bible’s teaching on sexuality, saying that casual sex is acceptable.
• And perhaps many people would argue that Christianity is about holding to a set of beliefs. But 70% of people identifying as Christians state that people are good by nature, a belief that has historically been rejected by Christians of every denomination. And, perhaps most strikingly, roughly half of all people who identify as Christians in America state that they do not believe that Jesus is God.

So what does it mean to be a Christian?

Obviously we can’t say what each person means when they say they are Christians. But we can at least look to see how the Bible answers that question. And one simple way of summarizing the Bible’s teaching is that a Christian is someone who believes the gospel.

Now, of course, this succinct statement needs a lot of filling out. “Believe” here means more than just intellectual agreement—it’s speaking of a trust that leads to commitment, a theme to which we’ll return in a few weeks. This morning, I want to begin considering with you the other key word in this definition. A Christian is someone who believes the GOSPEL. What is the gospel?

This morning we’re beginning a series on the apostle Paul’s letter to the Roman church. It’s roughly 25 years after Jesus was crucified and rose from the dead. Over these 2 and a half decades news has spread across the whole empire of what happened in the small city of Jerusalem. And where that news spreads, people believe and are baptized and begin to come together to form small churches—churches that have very little understanding of what they believe and how to live.

In Rome was a church like this—a church that Paul had never visited but that he knew about. He knew they were having a rough time living right in the shadow of the Roman emperor; he knew they were experiencing divisions within their small church community. And his conviction is that what they need most is to understand the gospel more deeply.

That, in essence, is what the letter to the Romans is: Paul teaching about the gospel with some specific applications to the Roman church. He begins to signal this in the very first verse.

Typically, a letter in that time began very simply. If I were writing to you in ancient Rome, it would normally begin something like. “Geoff,” and I might say something like, “Pastor of Trinity” or “Son of Mike and Celia.” And then, right after, I would say, “To my dear friends at Trinity.” And then I would add a greeting. “Grace and peace to you,” or something like that.

And you might have noticed that Paul does this. But he takes much longer than any normal beginning, because from the very get go, he wants to talk about one thing: the gospel. Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of GOD: and then he goes on to talk about that gospel. And what he introduces here in these opening verses he will go on to spend many chapters explaining. Because a Christian is someone who believes the gospel, and so Paul deeply wants to help them grow in their faith and understanding of this gospel.

So, again, what is the gospel?

Well it might help to start by saying, that “gospel” is not a word that was created by Christianity. In the Roman world, it was a word that had a normal meaning: it was an announcement of something happened, something, that at least from some people’s perspective was good. Oftentimes this announcement was about something significant politically, like an emperor having a victory or taking a throne. But the most basic idea was an announcement of something good that happened.

What Paul is talking about is about a specific gospel, of course, which he calls the “gospel of God”: God, the creator of the universe, has done something, and he has sent out this announcement. Paul’s gospel is God’s announcement of something good that has happened.

This morning, I want us to consider this opening summary of the gospel in verses 2-6, and I’d like us to notice the aspects to this announcement from God: that something real has happened. What’s more, something that has changed the world has happened. And also, that something personal has happened.

The Gospel is That Something Real Has Happened

It seems to me that when we think about the world, there are things that we see as real, and there are things that are our preferences. The “real” includes things like math: 2+2 is 4; science—earth’s revolution around the sun takes 365 ¼ days; history: the Civil War took place in America in the 19^th century. The thing about reality is it’s shared. It’s true for everyone. And that means it can be discussed, debated, we can work together on figuring out what reality is.

Then there are preferences, which also are important, but they’re not shared in the same way. My preferences really are about me. As we grow up, we come to discover things about ourselves—we prefer chocolate or strawberry; we have a preference for loud parties or quiet times of reading; you could even perhaps map this out politically: some a preference for big government while others prefer a society that prioritizes personal liberty. The thing about preferences is because they aren’t shared, you can’t really argue about them. If I say, “I prefer Mexican food to Italian food,” you’re not likely to say, “No you don’t.” Because it’s not a debate about reality—it’s purely subjective—it’s what I personally desire.

I bring this up because in our culture, “God” is generally treated as belonging to the category of “preference.” A recent survey found 60% of Americans agreeing to the statement that “religious belief is a matter of personal opinion; it is not about objective truth.” And you can see this in the rules that our culture has about how to talk about these things. People are expected to have the posture of, “I have my religion, you have yours; I have my way of thinking about God that works for me, you have your way. This is not something we should discuss.” And that kind of statement makes total sense if we are talking about preference: “I have my favorite restaurant and you have yours.” But it would be weird if we’re talking about reality, right? “I have my laws of physics and you have yours” just doesn’t make sense.   

So, one of the things we need to understand about the Christian gospel is that it is very clearly making a claim about reality. The Bible’s teaching is not just a group inspirational stories and instructions for how to live better; it’s not just a way of us connecting to ideas of transcendence. It is an announcement that something REAL happened. Something not private and subjective but something we can examine together. 

Paul says in verse 2 that this gospel, is an announcement that promises made through prophets of previous generations have now been fulfilled. This is a very specific claim. These prophets Paul is talking about are actual historical human beings and we have the documentation of what they wrote long before Jesus came.

• We have documentation that Nathan, about 1,000 years before Jesus, told David of God’s promise that David would have a descendant who would be a great king who would be called the Son of God.
• And we have the writings of Isaiah the prophet, who 300 years later wrote of God’s promise that this king would be known for his righteousness and closeness to God, and that this king would somehow take away humanity’s sin.
• And we have the writings of Ezekiel, a century later and still some 600 years before Jesus, prophesying that through this king God’s people would experience a kind of resurrection by the power of the Holy Spirit.

These are real promises written by real people in in real history, and the gospel is saying that something really happened to fulfill them.

And what’s more, we see that this gospel announcement is about a real historical person. It’s the gospel “Concerning his Son, who was descended from David.” We’re not talking about Hercules, some legend who stands outside of history. Jesus was a human being born around 3BC in Bethlehem, and we even have records of his lineage: he was a descendant of the real historical figure David.

And this gospel announcement is about a real historical event. Jesus was declared, or we might even say enthroned as the royal Son of God in power by the resurrection. The resurrection is not just some story to help us believe in new beginnings. There was a real tomb with no body in it. There were hundreds of witnesses including Paul, who report seeing Jesus in the flesh on multiple occasions, and many of those even went to prison or were killed for this testimony.   

The gospel is an announcement that God did something at a specific time in a specific place that affects everyone. Now you obviously can question this announcement, you can examine how reliable its claims are, and I’d encourage you to do so. But what you can’t do is treat it as simply a matter of personal opinion. Because the gospel announces that something real happened.

Something that Changes the World Has Happened

As we’ve seen in verse 4, what God did in Jesus finds its focus on the resurrection of Jesus.

When we talk about the resurrection at Easter, sometimes it’s framed as just the happy ending to a story about Jesus. Jesus was wrongly killed, but then after his death, he rose again. Isn’t that great? But that doesn’t get us to the gospel.

Sometimes the story is told with an awareness that it’s bigger than that. It’s not just that Jesus rose. It’s that death itself has been conquered, so that there is now a way for us to be able to face death without fear. This is getting closer to the gospel, but it’s still not quite there.

What the gospel announces is that when Jesus rose from the dead, it wasn’t just that God surgically repaired Jesus’ old body, healing the wounds and again starting up his heart. In the resurrection, God began something new.

Way back at the beginning of the universe at the beginning of time, when God said, “Let there be light” something new came out of nothing. This is the Christian doctrine of creation.

In the same way, on Easter morning, God said, “Let there be LIFE” into Jesus’ death, and something new came into existence. Jesus’ old broken dead body of death wasn’t just fixed, it was transformed into a new body of life. Jesus’ resurrection was the beginning of a new creation. When that happened, a new, transformed world began: a new world where Jesus, the royal Son of God, is King.

And here’s where we come to one of the real challenges in understanding this gospel announcement of what happened. For when we’re talking about a change as significant and as massive as this one, we’re talking about something very difficult to understand, and, for this reason, challenging to believe. 

As a general rule, we can accept and process change if we have the categories for it. If we take technological progress as an example,  in the 1800’s we learned how to communicate across vast distances with the telegraph machine, which was amazing. Then we developed the radio, which was like the telegraph, only with voices and music—amazing! And then the TV, which was like the radio, except with pictures. And then the computer, which was TV where you could make changes on the screen and it could respond; and then the internet, which was computers talking to each other, and then the smartphone. Each stage saw major change, but each stage was built on what went before, so that we could at least kind of understand it. That’s how incremental change works—we use categories from the old to understand the new.

But imagine if somehow someone today could go back in time to say, 800 years ago, and imagine trying to explain to a bunch of peasants in an English hamlet how things will change. Well, there’s this thing, electricity, lightning that we’ve captured and travels through big ropes to give powers to everyone to do stuff like suck the dirt off of our rugs or listen to Taylor Swift. And everyone has black rectangles—lots of rectangles, some really large, some medium sized, some small, and all can become a kind of window where you see people or things that aren’t there, like, the Kardashians. Now, how do you think these serf farmers and their wives would respond? Those willing to believe would ask, “What strange sorcery is this?” They would be certain it was magic—they would not understand.” And how could you convince the skeptic of something that is so foreign?

See when a change is really big, we lose the categories to understand it. It becomes difficult not only to think about, but even to believe. And the gospel announces that what God did in the resurrection of Jesus not something incremental; it was a really big change.

Our present world acts by laws that allow things to be consistent and predictable, even if not always welcome. Bodies get older and decay and die—that’s always, always how things work. We don’t have to like it, but we can predict it. Societies, not matter how idealistic they might be, will always have an ugly side, where the poor and vulnerable will always be mistreated. We don’t have to like it, but we can predict it. People, no matter how hard they try, will make mistakes, and not just mistakes, but people will do things that hurt other people. And in this life, God will often be confusing and feel far off, especially in times of suffering. Again, we don’t have to like it, but we can predict it.

But at the resurrection, all of that changed, for a new world began with new laws. The new body that Jesus arose with no longer can age or become sick, it is powerful, filled with life. And Jesus, with this new living body, arose to a new, kingly power. Rising from the dead he declares “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” A new society, a new humanity under his rule has begun, where the weak and the vulnerable are lifted up and honored; where injustice and cruelty and warfare will be no more and eventually forgotten—where there will be no ugly underbelly. In this new humanity, people will be able to become fully human, freed from addictions and selfishness and fear. And, we’re told, as Jesus rules, grace rules. For all who belong to his new kingdom, there is perfect forgiveness for all the wrong they’ve ever done, all the ways they previously failed God. None of that matters, for under Jesus’ new rule, they stand in grace. All who belong to this new kingdom, this new creation experience what it means to glorious children of God they were always meant to be.

Scripture teaches that this new creation, this new kingdom that began with the resurrection of Jesus now exists, even if it’s hidden for a time. There is now a new reality with new laws, filled with hope and joy and goodness for all who are part of it.

If you’re saying, “I don’t get it. It sounds too good to be true,” well, that’s my point. We are the peasant farmer and his wife being told about things far beyond our ability to comprehend; the God of the universe has done something that outstrips our very wildest imaginations. Of course this gospel announcement will be confusing. Of course it will be hard to believe. But, again, remember this: we’re not talking about a theory or a story. We’re talking about something that happened. Whether or not we understand it, whether or not we believe it, it’s real.

Something Personal Has Happened

But that’s not even the part that we have the hardest time believing, at least not for many of us. See, this gospel is not just an announcement that something real happened, something real that changed the world. It is God’s announcement that this really big change that happened, he has done for you. It’s personal.

When the Son of God came into the world as a descendant of David, when he died and rose again and a new kingdom, a new creation began, that wasn’t all for himself. He did it to make a way for people who were lost, enslaved to sin and guilt and death, so that these lost people can experience the life in God that they were made for. Notice in our passage what Paul says God has commissioned him to do. “We received apostleship to bring about obedience of faith for the sake of Jesus’ name among the nations.” His calling is to announce the gospel and invite people in to the kingdom of Jesus.

As we will come to see in our further study of Romans, this gospel teaches that anyone who trusts in King Jesus becomes so deeply connected to Jesus that they share with Jesus in all that Jesus has won. That all who trust in King Jesus will experience God’s forgiveness, will be restored to their full humanity, will be part of the new beautiful society of justice, will receive bodies like Jesus that will never age or become sick or die. If anyone is in Jesus, Paul will say, they too are a new creation.

And what I especially want you to notice is what Paul says next in verse 6. He says, “This includes you, who are CALLED to belong to Jesus Christ.” You who are called.

See when this gospel of God is proclaimed, there will be some who hear it differently from how we normally hear news. Some who will hear it in such a way that something deep, deep inside clicks, and they realize it’s true; they feel in a way they can’t explain the reality of this gospel, and they believe, and they are changed. Many of you this morning know what I’m talking about, because it’s happened to you. And what Paul is saying is that whenever someone hears the gospel like this, it’s not just an accident. What they are experiencing is God himself CALLING them to Jesus. If you believe in Jesus, that didn’t just happen accidentally. The God of the universe saw you and knew you and personally reached out to you and spoke to your heart. He said to your very soul, “All of this is true. And all of this is for you. I want YOU.” He called you.

If you believe in Jesus, notice how you are described in verse 7. You are “loved by God and called—called by him to be saints.” You are loved by God. And he has called you into becoming his holy, beautiful people belonging to the glorious new kingdom of Jesus.”

Only if you come to understand this do you truly know the gospel. The gospel is an announcement that something real has happened; an announcement that God has really done something world changing, beginning a new creation in the resurrection of Jesus. And this gospel is an announcement that that God has done this for you. For every single one of you who hear and believe, God in his love has placed his claim upon you so that you can experience all the good he has done in Christ. This is the Christian gospel.

And I wonder if even this morning, if any of you perhaps for the first time sense the call of God. If you feel within this desire to turn from your old and broken way apart from God. If you find within you an awareness that this gospel really could be true, that you really want it to be true, I want you to know. This really is for you. Jesus really came into this world for you. And God wants you. What he calls you to do is simply to believe. To believe the gospel. For that is what it means to be a Christian.