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
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