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