The Heart of the Gospel

1:11His freedom was won, and he was able to go back to England, but his heart burned for the Irish people. And so he went back over to Ireland, not to rid the island of snakes, but to go and share the gospel with people who needed to hear it. That's the Patrick that we remember today, who points to Jesus. Several years ago, I saw a movie about two people on a boat. It was called Titanic. I went to see this movie with some friends of ours. This is now, if you know me, and you know this movie, you know that there's no way that I would go and watch this movie.

1:59But I went because everybody wants to go see this movie. So I was in college and I went with some friends of mine, and the only place that we could sit was on the front row. This is before reserved ticketing that they have now. It was before essentially they have lazy boys in the movie theater. And so we went and sat in these uncomfortable seats in this uncomfortable position with my head staring straight up. And I remember Leonardo DiCaprio having to scheme his way onto the boat.

2:33And I remember Kate Winslet not wanting to get on the boat. And then I fell asleep. And then I woke up, and Kate Winslet was floating on a piece of wood that had plenty of room for someone else holding on to Leonardo DiCaprio and then letting go. That was Titanic for me. For some of you, Titanic may be your favorite movie. God bless you. And that's awesome. That's great. But it would be terrible for me to represent you, right? And to tell someone my terrible summary of the movie Titanic. Why? Because I took out the heart of the movie. All of the narrative. How did Kate Winslet get on that piece of wood? I had a guess.

3:38How did Leonardo Caprio end up floating down to his death? I don't know. I couldn't tell you that at the time. I've seen it since then. And I stayed awake mostly. But I couldn't tell you the heart of that movie. I'd be the last person to explain that to you. It should bother us that we talk about the gospel, not understanding the heart of the gospel. In other words, speaking of the gospel only in terms of I was bad, God is good, he kind of let me into his family.

4:27All of those things are true, just like the family. The fact that LeonardoCaprio did get on the boat, and so did Kate Winslet. But there's so much more to it than that. And when we don't understand how a holy God allowed unholy people into his presence without smiting them and without compromising his own holiness, if we can't understand that, then we don't really understand the gospel. Romans chapter 3, verses 19 through 26, Paul is going to explain what this means. The book of Romans, in and of itself, explains the gospel. The first 12 chapters are really about explaining in theological terms what the gospel means.

5:20And then the last 13 through 16, the last four chapters of the gospel, is how we live that out in life. So we need to understand as we approach this text, where is this text in the context, the greater letter, this greater argument that Paul's trying to make. So what is the argument? Well, in Romans chapter 1, verses 16 and 17, Paul says this. He says, For I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it's 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 to faith. As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.

6:10Now, the scuttlebutt around Paul at this time is the idea that Paul, you'll go to all of these smaller towns around Asia Minor and around Judea. You'll go to these smaller towns. You'll go to Corinth. You'll go to Ephesus. You'll go to Galatia. But you won't go to Rome. You won't go to what was kind of like New York City is today, the capital of the world, a place of intellectual sophistication. In other words, like you'll go to Podunk College, but you won't go to MIT. You won't go to Harvard.

6:50And Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. I'm not afraid to go and make an argument for the gospel. As a matter of fact, he explains earlier in chapter 1 that it's simply the Holy Spirit has not allowed him to go yet. If you know about the story of Paul, you know that Paul will end up in Rome. That is where he loses his life. Paul's not ashamed of the gospel. He says, I know and I understand the gospel. That's why I'm not ashamed of it. And then he's going to explain the gospel.

7:25And he explains the gospel really, not in verse 16. That's the power of the. Of the gospel, but in verse 17. For in it, the gospel, the righteousness of God, the right standard, what God requires, the perfection of God, is revealed from faith to faith. That's an idiom. It means from the beginning of faith to the end of faith, it is all of God. As it is written, and then he quotes Habakkuk 2:4, the righteous shall live by faith. So to Paul, the righteous shall live by faith is a way of explaining the gospel. Great. What does that mean? Well, here's what Paul does: it's almost as if you could take a parentheses and put it around verse 18 and then close the parentheses at the end of chapter 3. He's going to use almost three chapters to explain what the gospel is. Now, we're not going to go through every verse because we don't have till five. Amen, right? We only have till three for me preaching today. You'll be glad to know. You don't.

8:37Paul has an argument. What does righteous shall live by faith mean? To understand who's righteous, we have to answer a question. And the question is very simple: it's the heart of the gospel. How can a holy God remain holy and unholy people not perish when they are in his presence? Paul is going to demonstrate to us what it means to live by faith by showing us that neither the unchurched or the secular, what he would call the Greek, in chapter 1, nor the simply churched or religious, the Jew in chapter 2, neither are righteous through their work, through their keeping of the law.

9:25Look with me to verses 19 and 20 of chapter 3. Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law. Who's under the law? Well, according to Romans 1, 18 through 23, so that next verse after verse 17, Paul is going to explain how the Gentile, how the Greek, how the secular man is under the law and therefore under sin. He says, For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So what does Paul mean there? He means this. He says that every person has been given some light. God has revealed something about himself. In nature and in conscience. When we look at nature, when we look at the world, our reaction is supposed to be, wow, someone did this and it wasn't me. That's a great place to start. Amen? Someone did this and it wasn't me. When we look at the intricate nature of all of creation, we're to look at that and see, man did not make a tree grow. Man did not create the oceans. Man did not create animals. Man did not create himself.

11:08But his mind and his heart is supposed to be led to a place where he says, man, someone did this. And then man is supposed to wait for further light, which is what he does, right? Shake your head like this. No. He doesn't. He says, it's plain to them. Look at verse 18. What does man do with this truth, with this light he's been given? It says, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. That word for suppress literally means to hold down. Imagine, if you will, you're in a swimming pool. Not on a day like today, but it's warmer. And you're in a swimming pool. And you have a beach ball. And you've got that beach ball. What do you do when you take that beach ball and you try to push it below the surface of the water?

12:01You have to hold it down, don't you? Why? Because that beach ball wants to keep coming up, right? That's what it means to suppress the truth. Man has been given truth about God, he's been given general revelation, he's been given some light about God, but he takes that light and he suppresses it, he pushes it down, he holds it down. So, what does he do? He's going to go on and explain there in chapter one. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God, nor give thanks to him. That is what man should do with general revelation, with the light that he's given in creation and nature. He should honor him, and he should know that he is God. But they become futile. That word means useless in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools. And look at this progression. Look at this dissension, if you will.

13:08They exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. If you ever go and experience, if you ever see tribes that have not been contacted, I don't know why you would contact. Them. So, I guess if you see this on television, you hear about tribes that have not been contacted, you'll see that they have these animalistic religions that have been set up to where they worship the river God or they worship the bird god or whatever it may be. We've seen that all through history. But listen, Westerners, developed nations, we're not any different because we worship the first instance, mortal man. We worship ourselves, we worship our own thought, we worship our own ingenuity, we worship us. Only the fool says in his heart, according to Psalm 14, that there is no God. We just replace God with ourselves.

14:13We replace Him with our own ability to do great things. We have such great hopes and dreams. We give ourselves such false power. That is a way of describing the developed world, to describe the West, to describe the United States. We're so in love with technology. We're so in love with our own ability. We worship mortal man. So, even if you've never received the word of God before, even if you've never heard the gospel, even if you've never been to church, it doesn't matter. We're still accountable for what we have. And what we Do with what we have, with that general revelation, with that little bit of light, with that natural law, we break it. We pervert it. We make it into something like ourselves. Well, what about the church? What about the religious? In this case, in the closer context, Paul would say, What about the Jew? Well, in Romans chapter 2, verses 12 and 13, it says this: For all who have sinned without the law will also perish. That was the attitude of the Jew towards the Greek or to the barbarian. Well, he doesn't have the law. We have the law. Of course, they're going to perish. We have the law. They don't. But Paul says, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by the law. For it's not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law. Paul says to the Jew, as he would say to the religious, as he would say to the churched, it's not enough to simply have the law, to simply have the Bible. You have to actually do what it says.

16:10Well, I've been going to church my whole life. I'm in church today. Awesome. If I were to go sit in my garage, I would not become my pickup truck. Amen? It's not enough to simply have the law. It's not enough to simply call myself a Christian, to sit in a church. We have to be doers of the law. And how are we in doing the law? Well, Romans 3:9 says we're not doing real good because it says, What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we've already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin. The entirety of chapter 2 in Romans is about how the Jew, although he claims to be so righteous because he has possession of the law, these religious people claim to be so high and mighty because they have possession of the Bible. He says, You don't do it. You're not any different than the pagan. Your life is no different. It may look prettier, but Jesus would call the Pharisees whitewashed tombs, meaning that they look great on the outside, but on the inside is death, decay, because their hearts are not right.

17:27And they haven't placed their faith and their trust in Jesus Christ. For by the works of the law, no human being will be justified. Verse 20, chapter 3. Since through the law comes only the knowledge of sin comes only the knowledge of sin. Possessing the scripture is not enough. In Galatians, Ephesians 3, Paul calls the law, he calls it his guardian. Literally, that word means teacher or tutor. So the law was good to teach him what was right about God. The law is good, but it's not enough to save.

18:17The law is supposed to push us to see our need for a savior, not to the futility of believing that we can fulfill it to God's standard, because we can't. Look at verse 21. Verse 21 begins with but. But now. Chuck Swindahl would always say, Thank God for all the buts of the Bible. Amen. We see the same thing in Ephesians chapter 2. When Paul lists out to the Ephesians, he says, You were once these things. And he lists out all these sinful characteristics, but then he says, but now, when he transitions to the gospel. Verse 21, but now.

19:14The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it. But now, this wonderful transition, by the way, a transition that God Did not have to make. He would have been just in condemning all of mankind to a real place called hell, placing his wrath upon us and keeping it there for all eternity. You don't hear that preached a lot because it makes us uncomfortable, doesn't it? If only you could see what I see. It's hard to preach this, but we have to because it's true.

20:01He would have been justified to keep us there. But now. Amen. But now. The righteousness of God. What is God's righteousness? It's doing all that God has required. It's right standing with the Father. It is His perfect standard. The righteousness of God has been manifested. Pheneru, that means to bring to light, to make known that which was not known. It has manifested the righteousness of God apart from the law. This is huge. Apart from the law? Right here is where the first century Jew would close the book, the parchment. No, I don't want to hear that. It can't be apart from the law because he's been taught his whole life that I'm simply supposed to do the law to the best of my ability and that God will receive that because I'm a good Jew. Because I'm a good religious person, because I'm a quote, good Christian, whatever that means.

21:07But no, he says it's been manifested, it's been revealed, it's been shown to be apart from the law. Apart, literally means separated without the law. What does that mean? It means that you and I will have no part in adding to God's righteousness. We do not add anything to our salvation. We don't add anything. We are bankrupt. We are in need. The righteousness of God has been demonstrated. It has been manifested apart from the law. But that doesn't mean that the law doesn't speak to God's righteousness.

21:52Look at the end of verse 21. Although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the law, the law of Moses, the Pentateuch, the commandments, and all of the ritualistic laws that come from it, from the first five books of the Bible, and the prophets, both the minor and the major prophets of the Old Testament, Elijah, Elisha, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, as we've been going through this past semester. The law of God and the prophets all pointed to the righteousness of God being revealed. Apart from the working and the doing of the law. Remember the transfiguration from Matthew 9 and Mark and Mark, or so, Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9. Remember the transfiguration. Jesus brings Peter, James, and John onto a mountaintop, and there he transfigures. A part of the glory of Jesus is revealed. His deity is revealed. No one else gets to see this. And as he reveals himself, Elijah and Moses are there present. And we see Jesus speaking with both of them. Peter, of course, flips out, which he's known to do, and decides that he wants to build a tabernacle, a stone of remembrance, something to remember that Moses is here and that Elijah is here and the Son is here. And God speaks and says, Listen to my what? Law? No. Prophets? No. Listen to my Son.

23:42God does not denigrate the law and the prophets. He simply lays out their context. They point to the Son, the Messiah, Jesus. That's the purpose of the law and prophets. It's the point of. To the Messiah. But the law is not enough to obtain right standing with God because we can't keep it. So what's the answer? If not through the law, how do we obtain right standing with God? Jesus. Look at verse 22. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there's no distinction. The righteousness of God, the right standard of God, is illustrated, is demonstrated in Jesus, in his work upon the cross. And the way that we benefit from that is through faith in what Christ has done. Faith. Believing that God has made us right without my work.

24:53Believing that God gave, poured in to my bankrupt account. If you have a college student, you understand this very well. For a college student, every so often may call upon his parents saying, Father, Mother, who has raised me so well, my mother, who is so beautiful and gracious, my father, who is wise and strong. My bank account says zero. And that mother and father will do what? Good luck. Get a job? That's what, yeah, probably. But in this instance, for this story, for this illustration, that mother or father goes and takes money out of their own account. Money that that child did not earn and places it into their bankrupt account. And now that child spends that money like they did earn it. Amen?

25:58That is what it means for God to impute His righteousness, to place His righteousness into our bankrupt account. We aren't righteous, but God is. And through the work of Jesus Christ, God places the righteous acts of Jesus, their effect, which is perfection, and places that into our bankrupt account. How does that happen? How does that transaction occur? By faith. By believing that God has made us right without my work. Faith, trusting that Christ's work on the cross is all the work that I need for eternity. And by repenting of my sin, obeying God's word because of what he has done, not what I can do. That's what it means to have the righteous. Of God through faith in Jesus Christ.

27:06Why is this righteousness through faith available for all who believe, as he says there in verse 22? Well, remember Romans 3.9. We are all, Jew and Greek, under sin. Verse 23, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. This is a verse that probably in this text, out of all the verses, we probably knew this one first, right? Because this is used in the Romans road, right? Romans 3.23, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But what does it really mean? All have sinned. Harmatino. It's in the airest sense. That means that it happened in a specific place in time and that it can't be changed or altered. We have all sinned. All of us have. We can't go back and make it right. All of us have sinned. And there's nothing that we can do to make it better. We're all under account. We've all sinned, but we've also fallen short. To fall short, hysterio, that's in the present tense. It literally means to be inferior. In other words, there is nothing that I can do. I will never measure up to God's perfect standard. We have all sinned and cannot change it. And we have all fallen short. Short, we will never measure up to God's glory. That's encouraging, right? Listen, I understand that a lot of sermons happen outside of this church and other places where people come in and they get told how great they are and that God wants to meet their emotional felt needs, and then they get sent off into a world where they are beaten down with sin.

28:59And a lot of it is because they don't understand that they can never measure up with their own work. That is not how God saves us. It is apart from the working of the law. We've all sinned. We've all fallen short of the glory of God. But turn those smiles, those frowns upside down into smiles in verse 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Some big words here. Listen, Romans chapter 3, we have some of our big important words when it comes to understanding how God saves people. We have justified, we have grace, we have gift, we have redemption, we're about to have propitiation.

30:01Forbearance. These are huge words. So let's just sort of walk through these big words, can we, over these next few verses to help us understand the argument that Paul's trying to make. He says that they are justified by his grace as a gift. They're justified. That's a legal term. It means to be acquitted. It means to be found not guilty. You're declared by the cosmic judge, God Himself, to be not guilty of the sins that you know you've committed.

30:36That I know that I've committed. God has declared me not guilty. How? Why? It's by grace. It's free. It's without cost for me. I couldn't pay anything for it. It's a gift. That word, Dorin, it literally means without cause. By the way, it's the same word that's used in John 15, 25 when Jesus describes himself and says, they hated me without cause. He says, his enemies hated me for no reason. Same word is used in talking about the word gift. Without cause. They hated Jesus for no reason. God gives us grace, gives us his righteousness for no cause in and of myself. I didn't do anything to earn it. We didn't do anything to earn it. There weren't any special works. There weren't any special things that we could do. There wasn't the right church to join. There wasn't the right family or right country to be born into.

31:50We were all bankrupt. But his grace is a gift, a gift, a free gift, no strings attached. That is through redemption that is in Christ Jesus. The word redemption, it's actually a financial term. It's a commercial term that would be used in the marketplace. It means to buy back something, something you once owned, to buy it back and then to set it free. It was a word that was used a lot in talking about the slave trade of this time. This horrible, horrible, horrible blight on humanity that was slavery. In it, God brings out a wonderful, wonderful term called redemption.

32:51Redemption is to buy and to release. Jesus paid the cost of our gift of salvation. And bought him and released us from the penalty of sin. That's redemption. Verse 25. Whom God put forward, Jesus Christ, this is huge, as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. Propitiation is a big word. It's not a word that you use a lot. I doubt very seriously if this is a word that comes up a lot in conversation at Chili's, right? Propitiation. We kind of need to understand what it means. Remember that justifying is a judicial term that was used in the courts. Redemption is a commercial term that was used in the market. Propitiation, though, is a religious term. And it was used in the temple, beginning in the Old Testament. Propitiation. Hilasterion. It's a verb that means to satisfy. It means to satiate the wrath of a deity.

34:06Why would we need God's wrath satiated? Satisfied. Do you know how the Bible describes the wrath of God? Think about this at the end, the consummation of the age, at the end in judgment from Revelation chapter 19, verse 15. This is how John describes God's wrath being poured out. In judgment against those that are not his. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.

34:50God's wrath is to be taken seriously. God's wrath burns against sin. But propitiation is to satisfy that wrath. What does it mean? Well, it's taken from the Old Testament. Hilisterion, as a verb, means to satiate the wrath of a deity, but it also has a meaning as a noun. It's literally translated as mercy seat. Some of your translations actually may say mercy seat. In Hebrew, propitiation is translated as kapurt. It's where we get the word, the phrase, Yom Kippur, day of atonement.

35:37On Yom Kippur, on the day of atonement in the Old Testament, the high priest would enter into the holiest of holies. He could only do it one day of the year. And when he did it, he had to have a rope tied to his leg. Why? Because if he did not come in the right way, with his heart not right, and coming to provide mediation for God's people, Then God would strike him dead. And the only way to get him out without sacrificing your own life was to pull that rope and to pull him out. On that one day, when the high priest was allowed to enter into the holiest of holies, he would approach the Ark of the Covenant. I was going to have a picture of the Ark of the Covenant, but I figured you'd all seen Reddit as a lost ark. So, on top of the Ark of the Covenant, you have the two cherubim, these two angels, these angelic beings that are facing one another. They're covering their faces to give a picture of the holiness of God. And their wings are outstretched. And so it forms sort of a seat, a platform, if you will. Within the Ark of the Covenant is the Ten Commandments. It's the law of God, the law of God that has been transgressed by his people. And God's wrath burns against the breaking of his law. It burns against sin. And on that day of atonement, the high priest would take a spotless lamb, a perfect lamb, and place it on the mercy seat. And he would kill that lamb. And he would take the blood of that lamb and sprinkle it on the Ark of the Covenant. So that when God's wrath burned against his people, he Saw the blood of the Lamb upon his broken law. And the Bible tells us that his wrath was appeased.

37:44It was held back because of that lamb. Now, here's the thing about the Day of Atonement: it only happened once a year, but it had to happen every year. Why? Because God's people couldn't stop sinning. When Jesus came as a propitiation for his people, he came, the Bible says, once and for all. He was the perfect lamb of God, the hilisterion, the true mercy seat, where the blood of Christ covered over our inability to keep the law.

38:30In his forbearance, his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. In Exodus 12:23, we see where in Egypt, God sends as judgment over Pharaoh and his people. He sends as judgment this angel of death, of reckoning, into Egypt. And it says, For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians. And when he sees the blood of the blood, On the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door. He will forbear and not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you. The forbearance of God was pictured in the Passover, but it comes to bear in the person of Jesus Christ. Amen. That's the effectiveness of the blood of Jesus. And why did all this have to happen? Verse 26. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. To show literally means index. What do you do with your index finger? You point. The Old Testament law, the Old Testament prophets, the Passover, the rituals, the mercy seat upon the Ark of the Covenant, they were all there to point to, to point to the future, the one, the Messiah, the perfect Lamb that would come and give his life for their sins. For us, we point back, amen, to the cross, to that place where Jesus came and God's wrath was poured out upon him, and he gave him. Gave us his righteousness and took our sin and our shame.

40:40In the late 1970s, the Cadbury Chocolate Company in England, they used to have, they still do, they had the chocolate bunny. Comes out every Easter. You guys know about the chocolate bunny, don't you? Solid chocolate bunny, like that big. If you're a chocolate lover, not a big chocolate fan, but I could get fired up over this. Chocolate bunny, solid chocolate. In the 1970s, as a cost-effective move, they made the bunny hollow for one year and one year only because the people, as in all people who enjoy chocolate, revolted with their wallets, with their checkbooks, and did not buy the empty bunny. Why?

41:35Because it may look like the chocolate bunny, but if it's empty on the inside, it's not. Listen, the gospel, if it is only identified or defined as being something good that God did, as being something we should Sing about as being something that's good enough for us to gather around. If we talk about it in those terms and we don't talk about justification and righteousness and grace and gift and redemption and propitiation and God's forbearance, then we are emptying out, we are hollowing out the gospel, and it is to no effect.

42:33Remember what the gospel means. We were bankrupt. He imputed his righteousness into our account through the work of Jesus Christ upon the cross. Come today, sinner, by faith. Place your trust and faith in what Christ has done for your eternity. Call upon the name of the Lord Jesus who has come to save you and be saved. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this day. Thank you for this text. Father, without the gospel, without the work of your Son Jesus, we are to be pitied most of all.

43:23As we come to your table, Father, in fellowship, in common union with Christ. May we remember the blood that was shed for our sins. May we remember the body of Christ that was given up for ourselves. May we remember that you, because of what Christ has accomplished, are now both just and holy, and also our justifier and redeemer in Christ. In whose name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to the sermon audio from New Life Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. For more information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net.