#21 - Piper - Doing and Endorsing Evil - Romans 1:28-32

#21 - Piper - Doing and Endorsing Evil - Romans 1:28-32

 

How do we share out faith confidently?  I believe this sermon will encourage you with a new insight into how God created humans with the very understanding that they do know that there is a God and that not only do they suppress that truth, they also know that what they are doing is worthy of death. These are bold words by Paul and explained by John Piper that will/should change the way we approach sharing our faith...

 

In one sense, verse 32 brings chapter one to an end with a very bleak view of human nature. The point of the last half of the verse is to show that many people not only do things that they know deserve death, but also entice others to do them and approve when they do. “Although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.” In other words, the end-point of depravity is not just the suicidal love affair with sin, but the desire to bring others with you to destruction.

 

1. The first observation is that verse 32 takes us back to verses 18–19 and teaches us that everyone not only knows God, but also knows some of the moral demands of God and what disobedience deserves.

 

Now in verse 32 we learn that this knowledge of God includes a knowledge of his moral law: “They know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death.” Paul is speaking here of people in general who do not have access to the Bible or any special revelation. This is an astonishing affirmation about human nature. Everybody has knowledge of God and the moral law of God, whether they have seen a Bible or not, or whether they live in America or in an undiscovered people group of Irian Jaya.

 

 

2. The second observation is that this knowledge means people are without excuse before God not only because of the way they treat God, but also because of the way they treat each other.

 

The point of verse 32 is to say that “practicing such things” (the very things that God handed us over to) deserve death even though we have been handed over by God to do them. In other words, God’s judgment on sin—that it becomes worse and worse—does not lessen the guilt of the sinner. On the contrary, verse 32 says, “we know” that the very things we do when God hands us over to our own depravity are “worthy of death.”

 

3. The third observation from verse 32 is that there is a real knowing of moral things that is deeper than consciousness.

 

I say this because there are, no doubt, many people who would say that they don’t believe in moral standards set by God, especially if they say they don’t believe in God. But verse 32 says, “They know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death.” Note the phrase, “ordinance of God.” Paul teaches us that, even if people don’t think they know ordinances of God, they, in fact, do know at least one, namely, that doing the things listed in verses 29–31 deserves death. This must mean then that there is a knowledge deeper than consciousness.

 

Now, on the basis of these three observations, consider the implications for our sharing the gospel with unbelievers. Consider what this means for apologetics—giving reasons for your faith—and for missions to, say, Muslim people or Jewish people.

What verse 32, together with verses 18–21, teaches us is that every person we know, and every person we will ever talk to, already knows God, deep down, and knows God’s law. That is an astonishing truth for everyone who wants to communicate the gospel. Think on it specifically for a moment.

Verses 18–21 teach that everyone knows God, in the sense that everyone knows that God exists and that he is “eternal” and “powerful” and “glorious” and “beneficent.” At least that much, Paul says, is made known in nature and is buried somewhere in the subconscious of every person—in some deep, and in some just beneath the surface. We may suppress it, but we know it. It is there, and it has effects on our lives.

Then verse 32 adds that everyone knows not only that God exists and is eternal and powerful and glorious and beneficent, but also that God has a “righteous ordinance,” that the sins of verses 29–31 deserve the punishment of death. Everyone, Paul says, knows this. Charles Hodge puts it like this: “The most reprobate sinner carries about with him a knowledge of his just exposure to the wrath of God” (Romans, Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1972, p. 45).

 

What Does this Mean for Evangelism?

Not that everyone you talk to will necessarily admit that he or she knows this. But you come to them with the tremendous (Biblical) confidence that you are not starting from scratch in establishing the truth in their soul. They are not blank tablets. They may have buried it, distorted it, hidden it, drugged it, run from it by overwork or excessive play and entertainment; but you know it is there.

What do you do? You don’t assume they don’t need to hear that truth. You don’t say, “Well, the truth of God and his moral law is in their heart, so I will not tell them about God’s glory and power and his righteous demands.” Rather, you speak the truth with the confidence that this reality you are describing is not utterly foreign to them. You speak with the confidence that what you are saying can ring true with something deep inside of them.

 

What if they say, “How do I know that what you are saying is true? How do I know there is a God, and that he is glorious and beneficent? What about Hurricane Mitch and Honduras? Maybe God should be cursed instead of thanked. Maybe he deserves death for breaking my law instead of me deserving death for breaking his law”?

Now there are a lot of possible answers to this kind of question. 1) One would be to take them to Luke 13:1–5 and say, “Those who die in natural catastrophes are not necessarily worse sinners than the rest of us. Unless we repent we will all perish.” 2) Or you could take them to the book of Job and show them how Satan is involved in some natural catastrophes, but that God maintains ultimate control and brings all the events of the world to serve his good and overarching purposes. 3) Or you could take them straight to the cross of Christ and show them that, whatever misery we must suffer here, God shared our misery in order to save us from the final judgment on our sin and bring us to everlasting joy.

But Romans 1:32 suggests another possible answer. You might say, “I know you doubt the reality of God and his glory and his goodness and his moral law and your guilt for disobedience. I know that. But the Bible teaches that you really do know these things already deep in your heart. Which means that if you would humble yourself and ask God to free you from the blinding effects of sin, these things could take on a self-evidencing authority for you. You wouldn’t be dependent on me or anybody else. You would know the truth because God has revealed it to you in nature and has written it on your heart.”

 

O ponder these things for yourselves and for the people you want to reach with the saving gospel of Jesus. Ponder them in relation to Jewish people, for example, and Muslim people. Romans 1:32 says that every one of them knows that he has broken the ordinances of God, and that he deserves death. But neither Judaism nor Islam has a satisfying way to deal with this kind of guilt and get right with God. Therefore, if God would be pleased, in answer to our prayers, this innate knowledge could make them ready for the gospel—the good news that because of Jesus’ death for our sin, God declares righteous everyone who simply trusts in him.

 

 

 

 

# 20 - Piper - The perils of disapproving God - Romans 1:18-23

Wow. This message is penetrating and humbling. I have read this passage so many times, but I have never heard it as clear as Piper puts it. Take some time to reflect on some of the consequences of not putting God in your knowledge. It is a bit longer than most that I review, but I think you will find something in here that drastically change how you understand the judgment of sin on the world. I think it is obvious, but perhaps, so offensive to some, so unbelievable that we refuse to really believe that God would give us to the sin that repulses Him. At the end, there is a beautiful reversal that will encourage.

Paul’s teaching about why a society degenerates into unrestrained, debauched, destructive evil is unlike any analysis you would read today. One of the reasons for this is that when a society is sinking into moral decay, one of the traits of that decay is the inability to see what is happening. The social mind becomes so defective in the moral decadence that it doesn’t have the categories or the framework to recognize evil for what it really is.

We do live in such a day. The inability to render sound moral judgments is evident almost wherever you look. Which makes this passage of Scripture one of the most relevant and needed texts in all the Bible for our day—precisely because it seems so foreign. Today, if something doesn’t seem spiritually or morally foreign, it is probably part of the blind and decadent atmosphere we breathe, and therefore of no real use to us, no matter how good it makes us feel.

What we need is a word from outside our defective world and our depraved thinking. We need a word from God. And we may certainly expect such a word to be very strange, because we have become strangers to the reality of God in a very self-absorbed age.

So, that was review, but now he asks three questions:

1. Where Do these Evils in Verses 29–31 Come From?

2. What Is this List and Why Is it Here?

3. How Shall We Battle these Destructive Evils?

1. Where Do these Evils in Verses 29–31 Come From?

This is what Paul means by the wrath of God being revealed (verse 18): God’s wrath is being revealed against the world, as human beings all over the world set their affections on other things more than on God. God’s response to this worldwide disloyalty and treason against our Creator is not, first, to send us to hell, but to see that we sink into the swamp we have chosen.

First, he says that the root problem is that we don’t like having God in our knowledge.

he second step of God’s analysis is that God, in an act of judgment (recall the revealing of “wrath” in verse 18) withdraws his common restraints on our rebellion and gives us over to sink in the swamp we have chosen. This is what you will not hear in any social analysis today. Who today has the God-centered realism to say: The depth of our sin does not just deserve divine judgment, it is divine judgment? That is what Paul says. You can’t really understand America (or any other country) today without this revealed truth. Even if we tried to boast over God that at least we have our self-determination in rebelling against God, God would answer: you think so? Think again.

The third step in Paul’s analysis (in verse 28) is that the effect of God’s giving us over and removing his common restraints (see Genesis 20:6) is that we are imprisoned by a “depraved mind.”

The fourth step of the analysis (in verse 28) is that our defective mind produces all kinds of evils. Paul goes on to list twenty-one of them as samples.

2. What Is this List and Why Is it Here?

So what’s the point of listing all these sins? The point, I think, is to give us enough examples to show that virtually every form of evil has to do with God and comes from failing to know him and approve him and love him above all things. In other words, he gives us a sweeping array of evils to waken us to the fact that the ruin of any area of life is owing to the abandonment of God. Verse 28: they did not want God in their knowledge, therefore … and then he gives his list of evils.

In other words: the point of the list is to connect God with every sin in the world. And we’ve seen that the connection is twofold: every sin is rooted in our preferring something else to God; and every sin gets worse as God takes away his restraints and gives us up to sink in the swamp we have chosen.

If America has the highest murder rate in the western world, it has to do with God. If our executives are greedy, it has to do with God. If our politicians are deceitful, it has to do with God. If we gossip about each other behind the back, it has to do with God. If our talk show hosts are insolent and boastful, it has to do with God. If our children are disobedient to parents, it has to do with God. If we are untrustworthy and don’t keep our marriage vows, it has to do with God. If we are blind to obvious wrongs and are unloving and unmerciful, it has to do with God.

That’s the point of this list. Wherever we are sinking in sin, it is because we have jumped off the rock of the glory of God.

3. How Shall We Battle these Destructive Evils?

Which brings us finally to the third and last question: What is the solution? How shall we battle back against these destructive evils in our own lives and in our culture?

The answer is what the whole book of Romans is about. But let’s close by looking at three great reversals. 1) We need the reversal of God’s wrath against our unrighteousness. 2) We need the reversal of God’s handing us over to a depraved mind. 3) We need the reversal of our mind’s moral decay so that it can be renewed for right and proper use in God’s service.

The good news is that God has provided every one of those reversals. You do not have to sink any further if you will embrace God and his provision. Here is the key verse for each of these reversals.

The key verse for the reversal of God’s wrath against us is Romans 1:17: In the gospel of Christ, “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ ” In other words, the righteousness that God demands from us, he freely gives to us, if we will turn back to him and trust him to be our greatest Good. And if you have the righteousness of God, you are not under the wrath of God any more. A very happy reversal!

The key verse for the reversal of God’s handing us over to a depraved mind is Romans 6:17. “Thanks be to God that, though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were handed over [same word as Romans 1:28].” This is the exact reversal of the hand-over in Romans 1:28. Here it is to a form of teaching that is true and holy, not false and dirty. And notice that it is God who does it. “Thanks be to God,” Paul says, that you became obedient to this teaching. God gives us over to truth and righteousness as much as he once gave us over to sin.

Finally, the key verse for reversing the defectiveness of our minds is Romans 12:2. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

When God has given us his righteousness by faith in Jesus, and when he has handed us over to a new teaching of truth and begun to make us obedient to it, then little by little we are transformed in the renewing of our minds and the long list of sins in Romans 1:29–31 becomes shorter and weaker to the glory of God.

This is the key to life. This is the message that we take to the neighborhood and to the nations. I call you and urge you to receive these three reversals from the hand of God by faith: 1) the reversal of God’s wrath through the gift of God’s righteousness; 2) the reversal of being handed over to depravity through being handed over to truth; and 3) the reversal of a depraved mind through the transformation of a renewed mind

#18-19 - Piper - The Other Dark Exchange - Homosexuality - Part 1 and 2 - Romans 1:24-28

Glory.  The one word that makes or break the universe. I am encouraged how Dr. Piper has worked this out and I hope it is an encouragement to you.

 

My prayer for both weeks is that we as a church, and I in particular as the preacher, will find a Biblical balance between clear conviction about the sinfulness of homosexual behavior, on the one hand, and patient compassion to come alongside those of you who have homosexual desires, and your friends and relatives, and seek your good. I have no desire to drive homosexual people away. On the contrary, I would like to be able to say of our congregation what Paul said to the church in Corinth: after mentioning “fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers, swindlers,” he says in 6:11, “Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

 

I confess that my main aim in these two messages is not to persuade you that homosexual behavior is wrong. It is wrong. But you can believe that and not be a Christian. So what does it profit a man if he knows everything that’s wrong, and loses his own soul? My aim is much higher than to persuade you that there are many sexual disorders in the world—both homosexual and heterosexual. My aim is to transform the way you see Reality, and to put the glory of God back at the center, like the sun in the solar system of sexuality (and everything else) that holds all the planets of our passions in their proper order. When you exchange the sun for a man-made satellite all the planets leave their orbit and head for oblivion.

 

The root of all our disorders—sexual and social and physical and emotional—is the exchange of the glory of God for other things. The solar system of our soul and our society was made to orbit around the glory of God as its all-controlling sun. And the entire human race has exchanged the glory of God for weightless, substitute satellites that have no gravity and can hold nothing in its proper orbit. Therefore all the world is disordered and decaying and moving toward destruction.

 

The root of all our problems in this world is that the human race has exchanged the glory of God for other things and that God has handed us over to bear the fruit of this exchange in ten thousand troubles—all of which should call us to repentance and worship rather than rebellion and atheism. And when I say all our problems, I really mean all. I mentioned last week that even our physical diseases and our natural calamities are owing to God’s judgment on creation for our exchange of his glory for other things.

 

1. The deepest problem of our lives, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is the terrible exchange of the glory of God for images (verse 23). The exchange of the truth of God for a lie (verse 25). The disapproval of having God in our knowledge (verse 28). Failed worship is our worst disorder. This is beneath all the maladies of the world. Repairing this, not first our disordered sexuality, is our main business in life.

 

2. The sexual disordering of our lives, most vividly seen in homosexuality (though not only there), is the judgment of God upon the human race because we have exchanged the glory of God for other things. Sometimes people ask, “Is AIDS the judgment of God on homosexuality?” The answer from this text is: homosexuality itself is a judgment on the human race, because we have exchanged the glory of God for the creature—and so is AIDS and cancer and arthritis and Alzheimer’s and every other disease and every other futility and misery in the world, including death. That’s the point of Romans 5:15–18 and Romans 8:20–23, which we looked at when talking about Romans 1:18.

And what we saw there was that those who believe in Jesus Christ and are justified by faith and become the children of God are not taken out of this world of woe, but are given the grace to experience the very judgments of God on the human race as the merciful pathway to holiness and heaven rather than sin and hell.

 

3. The reason Paul focuses on homosexuality in these verses is because it is the most vivid dramatization in life of the profoundest connection between the disordering of heart-worship and the disordering of our sexual lives. I’ll try to say it simply, though it is weighty beyond words.

We learn from Paul in Ephesians 5:31–32 that, from the beginning, manhood and womanhood existed to represent or dramatize God’s relation to his people and then Christ’s relation to his bride, the church. In this drama, the man represents God or Christ and is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. The woman represents God’s people or the church. And sexual union in the covenant of marriage represents pure, undefiled, intense heart-worship. That is, God means for the beauty of worship to be dramatized in the right ordering of our sexual lives.

 

But instead, we have exchanged the glory of God for images, especially of ourselves. The beauty of heart-worship has been destroyed. Therefore, in judgment, God decrees that this disordering of our relation to him be dramatized in the disordering of our sexual relations with each other. And since the right ordering of our relationship to God in heart-worship was dramatized by heterosexual union in the covenant of marriage, the disordering of our relationship to God is dramatized by the breakdown of that heterosexual union.

 

Homosexuality is the most vivid form of that breakdown. God and man in covenant worship are represented by male and female in covenant sexual union. Therefore, when man turns from God to images of himself, God hands us over to what we have chosen and dramatizes it by male and female turning to images of themselves for sexual union, namely their own sex. Homosexuality is the judgment of God dramatizing the exchange of the glory of God for images of ourselves. (See the parallel uses of “exchange” in verses 25 and 26.)

 

Which leads us to one last word: The healing of the homosexual soul, as with every other soul, will be the return of the glory God to its rightful place in our affections.

 

1. Acknowledge the presence and pain of a disordered sexuality, with all the ambiguity of where it came from—much like other disorders and disabilities—and do not define your God-given personhood by your disordered sexuality.

2. Put your faith in Christ alone for the forgiveness of all your sins and for the gift of God’s righteousness and for the fulfillment of all his promises to you (Romans 1:16–17). The only sinner who can successfully battle his sins is a justified sinner. In other words, you fight against sexual sins from relationship, not for a relationship.

3. Begin to reorder your entire life around the centrality of the glory of God as your highest treasure. Homosexual sinning, like all other sinning, is an echo of exchanging the glory of God for other things. So restore the sun of God’s glory to its place at the center of your soul and all the planets of your desires will begin to return to their God-given orbit.

4. Resolve to live a chaste and, if necessary, celibate life by the power of God’s Spirit, with the confidence that if God does not heal now, he will in the age to come; and all the patience of purity of will be worth it (Romans 8:18). May God grant all the single people (and married!) at Bethlehem a passion for purity.

5. Seek wholesome friendships with both sexes, especially in groups. Here the burden lies heavily on the church to be a place where this can happen. We don’t do very well at this. And so I call on us—especially families—to go out of our way to have people (especially single people) over for meals and other gatherings. The more we do things in groups rather than pairs, the more opportunities we create for wholesome non-sexual relationships.

 

 

Steve Allen

ACTION Zambia

www.aliveinafrica.com

 

 

#17 Piper - Displays of God remove the excuse for failed worship - Romans 1:19-22

#17 – Displays of God remove the excuse for failed worship.

 

Romans 1:18–21

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19 because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

 

So, today Piper deals with the age old question: What about those who have never heard?  I  am so thankful for this sermon.

 

The objection is this: “You say, Paul, that the wrath of God is being revealed in history against humankind because the truth of God is suppressed by the human heart. Well, what about those who don’t have the truth of God? Don’t they have a legitimate excuse to protest God’s anger? How can it be right for God to be angry at people, and punish people for suppressing a truth that they never had?” That’s the objection that Paul is answering here, in verses 19–21.

 

So let me start first with his conclusion and work backward with you through the other three steps, and then we will turn around and move the other direction with a very

 

Step four: The conclusion—All men are without excuse and deserve the wrath of God.
Step three: This is because they do not glorify God as God or give him thanks.
Step two: This failure of fitting worship is not because of innocent ignorance of God, but in spite of sufficient knowledge about God.

 

Step one:

How did he do that? This is explained in the middle of verse 20 in the words, “being understood through what has been made.” God’s eternal power and divine nature—what can be known of God—have always, from the beginning of the creation of man, been “understood through what has been made.” When verse 19b says “God made [his power and deity] evident to mankind,” it means that God did something to make himself known. Knowledge of God did not just happen coincidentally. God makes provision for it.

 

What does he do to make himself evident? He made the world. He created—like a potter, or a sculptor or a poet, except he created out of nothing. In verse 20, when it says that God is “understood through what has been made,” the words “what has been made” stand for one Greek word (which you will all recognize), the word poiema. It’s the word from which we get “poem.” The universe and everything in it is God’s work of art. What’s the point of this word? The point is that in a poem there is manifest design and intention and wisdom and power. The wind might create a letter in the sand, but not a poem. That’s the point. God acted. God planned. God designed. God crafted. He created and made. And in doing that, Paul says in verse 19, God made himself evident to all mankind. The universe is a poem about God.

 

Now this too is extremely relevant for our day. Just as we saw that verse 18 was politically relevant, this text is scientifically relevant. Naturalistic evolution is treated as a given in our culture—the belief that the universe, and human life in particular, evolved by the sheer forces of matter, time and chance. Given enough time and some matter to work with, chance has brought about what we see in the universe and in the human species today. God as creator and designer is simply ruled out and thought to be an unnecessary hypothesis.

 

But increasingly in our day this assumption of naturalistic evolution is being shown to be a philosophical prejudice rather than a scientific conclusion from evidence.

 

Most recently of all William Dembski has written The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press). He points out that many well-known scientists must constantly suppress the suspicion that there is design (poiema) in the universe. For example, he quotes Richard Dawkins, an “arch-Darwinian” who says, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” And he quotes Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, who says, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved” (ibid. p. 21).

 

In other words, to use the words of the apostle Paul, the manifest truth of God’s poiema—God’s “designed things”—must be constantly suppressed, lest scientists be brought face to face with their Maker and have to glorify him as God and give him thanks as dependent creatures.

 

Most recently of all William Dembski has written The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press). He points out that many well-known scientists must constantly suppress the suspicion that there is design (poiema) in the universe. For example, he quotes Richard Dawkins, an “arch-Darwinian” who says, “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” And he quotes Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, who says, “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved” (ibid. p. 21).

 

In other words, to use the words of the apostle Paul, the manifest truth of God’s poiema—God’s “designed things”—must be constantly suppressed, lest scientists be brought face to face with their Maker and have to glorify him as God and give him thanks as dependent creatures.

 

How amazingly true the at we suppress God’s poem with resistance to obedience and submission and humility.

#14 Piper - Proud people don't say thanks - Romans 1:16-23

 I have a feeling that I will say this often during the next 500 days, but this was my favorite sermon so farJ  It is just so foundational and Piper really explains it well, giving his one point, in the context of his message, over and over again.  PROUD PEOPLE DON’T SAY THANKS!!!!

 

He starts off the message by explaining the universal truth that God created all things and all things are for him, through Him and to Him. The only proper response is THANK YOU!

For those who, by God’s grace, love the truth and don’t want to suppress it, creation becomes a dazzling lesson book in theology. It teaches the open mind that there is a deity, an infinitely marvelous Being, who made the world. It teaches that this Being has stupendous power and that he is eternal. The world in its molecular and visible and galactic structure and order bears the mark of an Architect. And if he is the Architect of all that is, then he was not brought into being by anyone else and is eternal. An eternally powerful, infinitely marvelous Maker of all things is evident from the lesson book of creation. But that’s not all we can read in this book.

If there is such an all-powerful, infinitely glorious God who made all things, then I, too, am his creature. And everything I have is from him. Who but the Creator gives to all men life and breath and everything (Acts 17:25)? Standing before the irresistible logic of the lesson book of creation, I have to admit that everything is a gift. It is inconceivable that the Creator should ever owe me anything. For when could I ever give a gift to him that I should be repaid? “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Romans 11:35–36). I am not my own; I belong to my Maker. My existence is owing to him, and therefore my existence must be for him.

But what can I give my Maker? If he were hungry he would not tell me, for the world and all that is in it is his. The birds of the air, the bugs in the field, the cattle on a thousand hills belong to him (Psalm 50:10–12). Everything that is, is God’s. I cannot improve him. I cannot enrich or add to him. I am utterly and inescapably and always the recipient. “He is not served by human hands as though he needed anything” (Acts 17:25).

 

The question to all of this is:

How, then, shall I live for him? How shall I please him?

 

And the answer is:

The answer to that question, too, stands written in the lesson book of creation mirrored in our own conscience. I must be thankful to him! If I cannot add to his glory, then I must honor his glory. If there is an eternally powerful and infinitely marvelous God who made all that is, then there is only one righteous destiny for his creatures—to live for the praise of his glory … to join our Maker in his manifest purpose to make his power and glory known and loved among the nations. How shall a mere creature honor the glory of his Maker? We all know the answer to that question: We honor his glory by cherishing it and being thankful. “He who brings thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies God” (Psalm 50:23).

Gratitude honors God. Gratitude is the echo of grace as it reverberates through the hollows of the human heart. Gratitude is the unashamed acceptance of a free gift and the heartfelt declaration that we cherish what we cannot buy. Therefore gratitude glorifies the free grace of God and signifies the humility of a needy and receptive heart.

 

It is really amazing how much we can know of God and our duty simply by honestly pondering the lesson book of creation: that there is an infinitely marvelous Being who made all things, who has eternal power, to whom we owe life and breath and everything, and therefore whom we should glorify and thank from the bottom of our hearts day and night. Nobody who will own up to the reality in which he lives needs the Bible to know that he should glorify God and give him thanks. It is written in the sky and in every human heart—but nobody does it.

 

But we have rejected the truth about God so we can be wise in our fooliness.

The reason the human heart hates the truth that creation teaches is because it is too humbling. From sea to shining sea the creation shouts that God has eternal power, God is the infinitely marvelous Being, God is the Maker of all that is, and we are utterly dependent on his absolutely free choices to create and sustain our life or not, and we should therefore glorify him and not ourselves and give thanks to him and not take credit for ourselves. But proud people don’t say thanks. Gratitude is the echo of grace reverberating through the hollows of the human heart. But proud people don’t need grace. They don’t think their hearts are hollow without God. They are filled with wisdom! So “claiming to be wise, they exchange the glory of the immortal God for images.” Proud people don’t say thanks. Tight-lipped, they take the diamond of God’s glory, enter the pawn shop of pride, and hock it for the broken marble of self-reliance. Then they take this little idol home, set it on the mantle of their mind, and bow down to it in a hundred different ways every day. “Although we knew God, we did not glorify him as God or give thanks to him but became futile in our thinking … claiming to be wise.” Proud people don’t say thanks.

 

So, how do we receive that grace from humility? Consider His glory through His creation and let thankfulness ring through your life…

 

 

Steve Allen

ACTION Zambia

www.aliveinafrica.com

 

 

Piper #13 - How the gospel saves believers - Romans 1:16-17

Here is Piper doing what he does best, simplifying it all to two things:

 

There are only two ultimate concerns in life. One is how to display God in our lives. The other is how to be happy in God forever. These are the great concerns in the world for every person and every people group, whether we are conscious of it or not. How shall a person think and feel and act so as to show the glory of God? And what must we think and feel and do so as to be fully happy in God for all eternity

 

And now he explains how we get there:

From our side the key to our being saved from the wrath to come is to go on believing and trusting God. The key, from God’s side, to our being saved is that he goes on revealing to us the righteousness of God in the gospel, month after month and year after year.

 

Justification (God’s righteousness completely imputed to us) is the foundation of glorification (God’s righteousness completely imparted to us).

 

In other words, the foundation for all our future hope of life and joy and salvation is based on God’s giving his Son to die as a substitute for us so that our sins could be on him, and his righteousness could be on us. It’s the same pattern of salvation in Romans 8:30, 32 and Romans 5:9 and Romans 1:16–17. This is the great theme and structure of this book.

 

All our hope for salvation (verse 16) hangs on beholding and believing the revelation of God’s righteousness as a gift to us (verse 17).

 

To fulfill all that is required of us to enter heaven, we must see it over and over again—the ongoing revelation in the gospel that the righteousness of God is given to us freely through faith. If we don’t know ourselves acquitted and forgiven and counted righteous now, we will not be able to walk the path that leads to life. Either we will despair and turn to worldliness; or we will try to earn our way into God’s favor with moral and religious performances.

Everything God requires of us as believers assumes that we are justified—accepted, forgiven, acquitted, counted righteous with his righteousness, not ours. From that secure position we must fight sin and unbelief. And the one who fights like that—as a justified sinner—will live.

 

So here in Romans 1:17 it says, “The righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.” That is, when the revelation of the gift of righteousness meets with faith it leads to future faith. Faith is the initial window of the soul that lets the light of the revelation of righteousness in. And when the light of God’s gift of righteousness comes in by faith, it powerfully works to awaken and sustain and engender more and more faith for the years to come.

 

What saves is persevering faith (Mark 13:13; Colossians 1:23). If that’s true, now it makes clear sense why verse 17 explains how God saves believers by saying that in the gospel God reveals a righteousness for us that is first perceived and embraced by faith, and then has the effect of awakening all the necessary future faith that we need in order to be saved

 

The gospel saves believers because the gospel keeps believers believing.

 

So every time the Bible demands you to do something do not think, “I must do this to take away my guilt or to get forgiveness or to get a right standing with God.” Rather think, “I will do this because my guilt is already removed, I am already forgiven, I already have the gift of God’s righteousness, and so I know that God is for me and will help me. So I will trust him and obey him and display by my radical, risk-taking obedience the glory of God’s grace. And I will draw nearer and nearer to him in the fellowship of his sufferings and the joy of his companionship.

 

 

Steve Allen

ACTION Zambia

www.aliveinafrica.com

 

 

#12 - Piper - How does the Gospel save Believers? - Romans 1:16-18

#12 - Piper - How does the Gospel save Believers? - Romans 1:16-18

 

One of the things that has most encouraged me in these early sermons is Piper recognition that Paul is writing to BELIEVERS in Rome about needing the gospel preached to them. 

 

This is how Piper identifies himself with Paul in preaching to his own flock:

 

I say it with Paul: I, John Piper, am eager to preach the gospel to you who believe—exactly to you who believe—because this gospel which is laid out in the book of Romans, is the power of God to save you. You believers need to hear the gospel in order to be saved.

 

And then Piper lays out a quote worthy of the gospel hall of fame:

 

And I fully believe that the reason he does is that when believers know and love and live on the meat of the gospel, we will be so gospel-filled and gospel-shaped and gospel-dependent and gospel-driven and gospel-hoping and gospel-joyful that no one will need to tell us why we need to share the gospel or how to share the gospel. We will be so thankful and so desperately, day-by-day dependent on the gospel for our own hope of eternal life, and our own sanity, and our own stability, and our own marriages or singleness, that it will be impossible not to know that people need the gospel and why they need it and how it relates to their biggest needs—because we know we need it, and why we need it, and how it meets our biggest needs day by day.

 

Why comes of preaching the gospel to believers?

Paul was utterly convinced—and we should be too—that preaching the gospel to believers would bear fruit. Look back at verse 13: “I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I have planned to come to you (and have been prevented so far)so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles.” When the gospel is preached among believers there will be fruit! All kinds of fruit. Righteousness, peace, joy (Romans 14:17)—and converts who hear and see the gospel from the people of God.

 

It’s true that we see in the gospel, day by day, all that is needed for God to be righteous, and to declare us righteous, and to progressively make us righteous. That’s what the gospel reveals to us day by day. That is what we grasp hold of by faith. That is what keeps us believing and helps us fight the fight of faith and persevere to the end and be saved.

 

What we need day in and day out, in order to make our way to heaven, is to see and receive and feed on this gift of imputed righteousness. This is the way God saves believers. This can be and should be grasped by children. Let me try to say it simply. We all do bad things and we all are bad in the sense that the bad we do comes from a deeply rooted badness. Our bad deeds come from a bad heart. But God says that we should be good or he cannot accept us, because his own goodness would be ruined by our badness. So what we need is for God to take our badness and punish it in the death of Jesus, and then take the goodness of Jesus—his own goodness—and make it ours.

That’s what he did. So everyone who believes in Jesus receives the gift of God’s goodness, God’s righteousness. That is called justification by faith.

 

Don’t miss this exhortation at the end!

Look to it daily in the gospel. Be relieved by it daily from the gospel. Be encouraged by it daily from the gospel. Be emboldened by it daily. Be empowered daily. You live by an alien righteousness. Not by your performances, but by God’s. This is the gospel we live by and this is the gospel we will share this week with family and friends. And this is the gospel that will save us and bring us safely home to God.

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Allen

ACTION Zambia

www.aliveinafrica.com

 

 

#11 - Piper - How does the Gospel Save Believers - Romans 1:16-17

If there is one thing I am continuing to learn about preaching from Piper is that his sermons are based on questions from the Bible with answers from the Bible. Not exactly revolutionary, but brilliant nonetheless.   

 

 What’s the problem that we need salvation.

The answer in the book of Romans is resoundingly this: We need to be saved from the wrath of God. Look at Romans 1:18, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” This is given as the reason why we need saving. God is very angry at our unrighteousness and the way we suppress and distort the truth to justify ourselves.

 

The gospel is mainly the good news that God himself has rescued us from the wrath of God. Not mainly from ourselves and the mess we make of our lives; but from his own anger and his own righteous judgment. The gospel is the power of God for salvation from the wrath of God—the power that brings us to eternal safety and joy in the presence of God.

 

How does the gospel save believers? How is the gospel God’s power for salvation?

 

Paul begins to explain for us how the gospel saves believers. He does not just say, “It shows the love of God.” Paul gets inside the love of God and shows how God deals with the real problems of the universe. We begin to learn what the real issues of the universe are.

 

The answer of verse 17 is this: the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes because “in it [that is, in the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.”

 

So how is this good news—that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel? Here’s the answer: God demands righteousness and we don’t have it, so the only hope for us is that God himself would give the righteousness that he demands. That would be good news. That would be gospel. And that is what he does. What is revealed in the gospel is the righteousness of God for us that he demands from us. The reason the gospel is the power of God for salvation—the way that the gospel saves believers is that in it God reveals a righteousness for us that God demands from us. What we had to have, but could not create or supply or perform, God gives us freely, namely, his own righteousness, the righteousness of God.

 

What is our hope to escape this wrath when we are ungodly and unrighteous? The answer is that God would intervene and supply us with a righteousness that is not our own. That he would give to us the righteousness he demands from us. If God would do that, then his wrath would be averted and we could be reconciled to him. And that is, in fact, what he did. And that is the gospel. That is the way it saves us.

 

And I just wanted to share one more quote from Piper on Martin Luther that puts passion and bones on this idea of righteousness:

 

But to close today I want to go back to Martin Luther. Maybe God will use his testimony to bring some of you from mere hearers this morning to those who love and live on this gospel reality of God’s gift of righteousness. You remember he said he hated Romans 1:17. But he goes on explaining his struggle with his own guilt and fear before the righteousness of God.

Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at [Romans 1:17], most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted. At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ ” There I began to understand [that] the righteousness of God is … righteousness with which [the] merciful God justifies us by faith… . Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. (Martin Luther: Selections, pp. 11–12)

 

 

 

 

Steve Allen

ACTION Zambia

www.aliveinafrica.com

 

 

#10 - Piper - To the Jews First - Romans 1:16

#10 - Piper - To the Jews First - Romans 1:16

Piper starts off his sermon with the focus on the word EVERYONE!

Paul has just used that wonderful word “everyone” in Romans 1:16, “The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes.” O, what an exhilarating word to those of us in this room who feel that there is something about us that rules us out! Wrong family, wrong background, wrong education, wrong language, wrong race, wrong culture, wrong sexual preference, wrong moral track record. Then to hear the word, “Everyone who believes.” Everyone! One thing can rule you out: unbelief. Not trusting Jesus. But nothing else has to. The good news that Christ died for our sins, and that he rose from the dead to open eternal life, and that salvation is by grace through faith—all that is for everyone who believes. Not just Jews and not just Gentiles and no one race or social class or culture, but everyone who believes.

He then does a magnificent job explaining why it is the jews first and then then gentiles. It can be summed up these six statements:

So when Paul says in Romans 1:16, “The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek,” we should call to mind these six ways that the Jews have a priority over the Gentiles.

They are the historic chosen people of God.

They are the guardians of God’s special revelation, the Old Testament Scriptures.

The Messiah and Savior, Jesus, comes to the world as a Jew to Jews.

Salvation is from the Jews, since everyone who is saved is saved by being connected to the covenant with Abraham by faith.

The Jews are to be evangelized first when the gospel penetrates a new region.

The Jews will enter first into final judgment and final blessing.

He then addresses the question, then why does he say Jews first?

Being influenced by Romans 11:17–32, I think the answer is that Paul wants to humble both Jew and Greek and make them deeply aware that they depend entirely on mercy, not on themselves or their tradition or ethnic connections. To the Gentiles he says, in essence, salvation is of the Jews. You are not being saved by your Greek culture—or any other culture. You are being saved by a salvation that comes through the despised Semitic people called the Jews. “You do not support the root [of the Abrahamic covenant], the root supports you.” So do not boast over the branches (Romans 11:18). We Gentiles are saved by becoming, as it were, spiritual Jews (Romans 2:28–29). This should humble us and strip us of any arrogance and boasting in any presumed ethnic superiority. It also should vanquish anti-Semitism and fill us with zeal for evangelism to Jews.

Similarly, Paul says to the Jews, your salvation is not your own. It is God’s and he gives it to whom he pleases. He can raise up from stones—even Gentile stones!—children to Abraham (Matthew 3:9). The words “also to the Greek” in Romans 1:16 would have been as offensive to the Jews as the words “to the Jew first” were to the Gentiles. What they thought were Jewish prerogatives are, in fact, shared by the lowliest Gentiles who believe. Both of us are being humbled. We Gentiles must humble ourselves to be saved through a Jewish Messiah and a Jewish covenant. Jews must humble themselves to receive unclean Gentiles into full covenant membership and share all the blessings of the promise of Abraham.

The whole point is that God is the One who has mercy. Ethnicity is not decisive here. There is no merit with him. We are all sinners. So the real emphasis falls back on that wonderful word “everyone” that we started with:

“The Gospel is the power of God to everyone who believes.”

So, whether Jew or Gentile, believe! And receive the power of God to save you from your sins and guilt and death and judgment and hell, and bring you home to ever-increasing joy in his presence forever and ever.