Or, The Business of RighteousnessRomans 1:16-17September 26, 2021 Lord’s Day Worship Sean Higgins

Introduction

God is in the righteousness business. What I mean is that He is engaged in an activity for a particular end. His business is not to make money, but to remake mankind. He isn’t open for business only on certain days of the week, M-F, or Sunday, but His work goes on around the clock. God is in the business of revealing His righteousness as men receive it by faith and as they embody it by faith. It’s a gift business, start to finish, all the way through. It is good news.

Romans 1:16-17 provide the thesis statement of the letter. These two verses fit in the flow of his greeting, and in fact are subordinate to the last assertion Paul made in verse 15. There are four “for”s following his comment that he is eager to preach the gospel among them: 1) for he’s not ashamed of the gospel, 2) for the gospel is God’s power, 3) for in the gospel God’s righteousness is revealed, and then 4) for God’s wrath is revealed (verse 18). Verse 18 changes the subject, even though it is still offering additional explanation on the previous.

Although grammatically verses 16-17 contain subordinate clauses, thematically they contain the superlative climax. This is the center of the evangel, and of the epistle.

Paul writes to the Romans because he sees them as part of his calling as the apostle to the Gentiles. Even more, he writes to them to establish a relationship so that perhaps they could be his base of mission to take Christ into Spain and West from there. And, in all this, he writes to them about the gospel of God, the gospel of righteousness, so that they would have a gospel base for Christian living. Here is the obedience of faith, here is blessing, here is bold hope. He had such obedient and blessed boldness, and it came from the gospel.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, “The just shall live by faith.”

Here is a three step explanation of his eagerness to preach the gospel.

Eager BECAUSE he’s not ashamed of the gospel.

This is a well-known statement for many Christians, but that familiarity masks how odd it sounds, at least without some assumptions and context. Paul was eager to come to Rome, eager to encourage and be encouraged by the Christians in Rome, eager to preach the gospel in Rome. Who said anything about him being ashamed? Ashamed about what? Ashamed in what way?

When Paul writes about not being ashamed he isn’t referring to some guilt or moral stain. He’s speaking about not being ashamed as not being fearful. There are a number of synonyms that help us understand. He’s not hesitant to speak about it, not feeling the need to keep it quiet. He wasn’t reluctant to make it public.

And the reason that someone might be reluctant to talk about it is that you anticipate that it might not be appreciated by those you tell. In Paul’s case, he had experience. He had experience on both sides of the stick.

Before he believed in the gospel, when his name was still Saul, Paul was persecuting people who believed this message. He was putting them to death, and doing so in the name of God. He was making martyrs of the gospel of righteousness in, what he thought was, the service of righteousness. He also knew Jesus’ teaching about how men would naturally receive the news: they would insult the believers, hate them, treat them with contempt. As Paul was in Corinth when he wrote to the Romans, he knew that the word of the cross was scandalous to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. As any timeline of Paul’s life shows, before writing to the Romans he had already been imprisoned, laughed at, stoned and left for dead. He was not imaging things.

Being asha[...]