Not Ashamed - Romans: Book of Revolution

I'm Professor Steve Hole.

I want to empower you today to walk in your true identity as a worshiper and warrior.

Today, embrace the power of God's Word and the Holy Spirit.

Welcome to the Born for War podcast.

All right, men and women, we are in Romans 1, and this is the passage.

I mean, you could you can argue that this is the theme of Romans.

I think everyone who's who's a true commentator of Romans would say this is the theme of the book of Romans, but it's probably, arguably, one of the great themes of the entire New Testament, if not the whole Bible.

So I can't do justice in the brief amount of time that we have together to Romans 1, 16 and 17, but I can tell you that if this gets into your heart, if you experience what this passage is all about in your life, it will change the trajectory of your life.

And in the first service, a number of people, surprise me, a number of people came forward to give their life to Christ because of this passage, because this is the inerrant word of God.

And when I speak of the true gospel, I'm speaking of what I see happening in the church in America.

It's been happening a long time in Europe.

Now it's beginning to bleed over into the evangelical church in America through progressive Christianity.

As we see increasingly men and women and pastors and leaders giving up the inerrancy of scripture and the true gospel for something less than what's being talked about right here.

So let's look at this Romans 1, 16.

For I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.

For the Jew first, and also for the Greek.

For in it, the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.

As it is written, the Josh shall live by faith.

Four things.

Jot these down.

Four things that are in this passage.

Number one, the true gospel renders no shame.

Number one, the true gospel renders no shame.

Number two, the true gospel is the power of God.

The true gospel is the power of God.

Number three, the true gospel is the righteousness of God.

So the true gospel renders no shame.

It is the power of God.

It is the righteousness of God.

And then fourthly, the true gospel is released in your life through faith, through trust.

Not through your works, but through the faith that you put in the righteousness of God being poured into your life.

So look back at Romans 1.

This is the key of, really, it's the key of all of chapter 1, but let's look at the first four verses again.

Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God.

This is what we call classically the good news, the good news of Christ.

Well, what is it?

Well, he begins to explain here.

He says, which he promised before through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures.

So Paul says the gospel is first of all prophesied ahead of time, which we just looked at two prophecies here this morning, but prophesied hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, of the coming Messiah.

That was the lead up to the gospel.

Verse three, concerning his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

So men and women, the gospel becomes intentional, proactive, retroactive with the power of God when you make Jesus Christ Lord.

When he is the Lord, when he is the king.

This is why Caesar in the first century, and this is why the leaders and the government officials in Jerusalem in the first century were so fearful of the gospel of Jesus Christ, was because these people who had come to Christ, who were now called Christians, little Christs, they had made not Caesar Lord anymore, not the government Lord anymore, not the Romans Lord anymore.

They made Jesus Christ Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh.

In other words, he was fully God and fully man.

Verse 4, and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness by the resurrection from the dead.

So what is the gospel?

The gospel is the prophetic word coming through the scriptures.

It is the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Paul, in describing this to the 1 Corinthians, I mean to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, he said, Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preach to you, which also you receive, and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preach to you.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

For I delivered to you first of all that which also receive, that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose again on the third day according to the scriptures.

According to the scriptures twice.

Why is that important?

Because when socialist regimes and communist regimes, authoritarian regimes come into power, the first thing they want to take away from the church and from the people is the scriptures.

True secularization of a culture begins when the scriptures are taken out of the schools, when the scriptures are taken out of families, when you can't find a Bible.

That's Maoist China, that's Stalin Russia.

And that's when the bloodshed begins.

Because there's no guide, there's no power to counter the power of the government.

So the gospel, men and women, is that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose again on the third day according to the scriptures.

It's the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

That's the power of God.

The power of God is believing in the life of Christ, that he was fully God and He was fully man and that he was sinless, and thus he was the righteous Lamb of God.

And that his death on the cross supersedes any righteousness that you have, and that when we put our faith in him, his righteousness becomes our righteousness, and we're fully forgiven and set free.

But even that's not good enough.

Because it's the resurrection of Christ, it's his death, and then on the third day, his resurrection, that conquered sin, conquered Satan, conquered demons, and conquers any government authority that opposes it, because it's the power of God unto a righteousness through a saved saint who walks out the gospel through living Christ within them, expanded out into the life of love and kindness and forgiveness and power that exudes from their life.

That's Romans 1, 16 and 17.

So the true gospel, look back at verse 16.

Romans 1 16.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The true gospel renders no shame.

All of us carry shame.

All of us have shame in our life.

Shame is that hiddenness, and I'm going to talk more about this on Tuesday morning to the men, but in a nutshell, shame is that hiddenness within you of things that you've done, or maybe they've been done to you that you don't want anybody to know about, and you've covered it up, and it handicaps you.

It handicaps you emotionally, it handicaps you spiritually.

It'd be like you're an athlete and you've got a broken leg, but you don't want to get it fixed.

You don't want to get it set.

And so you learn to compensate with the broken leg.

And you're trying to do life, you're trying to do your sport with a broken leg.

Many of us are carrying shame, and it's broken us emotionally.

It's broken us spiritually, and we've learned to hide it.

So what you can imagine, like I've had issues with my left knee recently, my knee and my ankle.

And I know it's related not only to skiing last year with something that happened, but also to an injury when I was 18 at the University of Georgia on floor exercise.

It's probably scar tissue there.

So I'm dealing with that.

But but what I have to be so careful of is I start to compensate, right?

I start compensating.

So that's what you do with shame.

You compensate emotionally, you compensate spiritually.

And when you do, usually the actions, the attitudes, and the work that begins to happen in your life is worse than the hidden shame.

Because we're covering it up.

But if you're born again, you have a new heart, you have a new spirit.

We can become vulnerable about that.

We can invite Christ into our shame and begin to let Him set us free.

You're all born liars.

You're all born adulterers.

I'm a born liar, man.

I've got I've had seven kids, and I've never had a class with my kids teaching them how to lie.

Okay, today, kids, we're gonna do lying 101.

You're just way too honest around here.

So we're gonna start showing you how to lie.

Someone says that they struggle with being born a certain way.

Total, not that's a nonsectary to me.

That's exactly true.

I'm a born adulterer left to my own devices.

I'm a born liar left to my own devices.

But I've been born again.

And when you're born again, you get a new heart and you get a new spirit.

Ezekiel says, I will give them one heart and I will put a new spirit within them, and take the stony heart out of their flesh and give them a heart of flesh.

When we give our hearts to Christ, when we trust in him, he does open heart surgery.

He does open heart surgery and he takes that old stony heart and he gives you a kind heart.

He gives you a loving heart.

He gives you a new spirit.

In Jeremiah 31, the prophet writes, but this is a covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord.

I will put my law in their minds and write it upon their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Iranius, the great church father, said, A man fully alive is the glory of God.

You cannot be fully alive if you're walking in the hiddenness of shame.

But when we give our hearts to Christ, when we allow Christ to come in, I want to challenge you that when you become vulnerable with your shame and God begins to move in those hidden areas of our heart, and you need bloodstained allies, you need others in your life that will listen and care and not and be non-judgmental, begin to give that over to Jesus, He comes and transforms us from the inside out.

And so guess what happens?

When you're hiding nothing, then nobody has anything on you.

You become fearless.

The most fearless people are those individuals, and I'm talking about sincere fearlessness, I'm not talking about those that are doing it to grandstand, but I'm talking about those that are really fearless about convictions that they have and can take the heat when it comes, is someone who has conquered shame and now walks with no shame.

So they're not ashamed of the gospel because they've seen the power of shame broken.

I can't tell you how many times people have said stuff about me to me, and when I hear it, I smile and I go, if you only knew.

Is that all you got?

Interview my wife.

I don't care.

Because we have the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we've been set free and we're forgiven, and we can walk in that forgiveness, and we don't have to be ashamed anymore.

That is the gospel.

The gospel is the power of God that takes away shame, and when he sets us free from shame, we become a new person that God can mightily use.

Because it's not you anymore, it's Christ working in you because you're born again.

Peter.

Peter.

The apostle Peter, who daily woke up and brushed his teeth with shoe polish.

Peter, who can't even, you know, say that he even knows Christ at night to a servant girl by a little fire.

Three times he denies Christ.

And yet something happens to him between that experience and then the coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts chapter 2, he is a fearless warrior.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Well, I believe it's when Jesus confronted him on the Sea of Galilee where he'd been fishing, he said, Do you love me?

Do you love me?

Do you love me?

Broke the power of shame.

But even that wasn't good enough.

Even that wasn't good enough.

He says, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation.

You see, Peter had not experienced the power of God.

There's 18 different words in the Greek for power.

The one word that's chosen here is dunymus.

The word we get to derive from dynamite, dynamo, dynamic.

You see, Peter had never discovered the dynamic power of God.

Have you discovered the dynamic power of the gospel?

Because even in discussion with Jesus, after all the time that they had had with him, in Acts 1, we read, and being assembled together with them, he commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, You have heard from me.

For John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, even to the remotest parts of the earth.

Pastor Philip is living that out in Pakistan.

So many of you in this room are living that out every week.

I know your stories, man.

I know where you've been, I know where you're at, and look what God has done.

That's the power of God, man.

The power of God came upon Peter.

That same power that's the power of the gospel itself.

The gospel, not you, not me, is the power of God.

And when the power of God is proclaimed, there's power on it because it changes men and women's hearts like nothing else.

And so here's Paul, who's now a prisoner in Rome.

He hasn't killed anyone, he hasn't stolen anything.

He hasn't broken but one law.

And the law that he has broken is that Caesar is Lord.

And Paul won't say, Caesar is Lord.

He said, Jesus Christ is Lord, and that was so frightening to the authorities at that time, they imprisoned him.

The Jewish authorities in Jerusalem were so frightened of just that message.

It had so much power on it.

They were persecuting them.

And of course, you know that was Saul's life before jailing and even killing the new believers at that time because there was power on it.

Church.

Watch the trailer.

Um I got contacted by someone um yesterday who was asking about possibly some kind of a special thing for the church to watch this.

But this is about the 1969 Jesus People movement.

Really good.

It's really good, partly because the trailer has the Doobie Brothers in it, which I really think is is very, very special.

But um the argument could be made that the greatest spiritual awakening in America was between 1969 and about 1974 with the Jesus Revolution.

And that's the title, Jesus Revolution's title of the movie, but that was the title of Time magazine when they put that in there.

Um, I think around 1970 or something like that.

The Time Magazine article.

We need a Kingdom of God Revolution America.

That's the power.

You guys know, you that are new here, you may not know, but you that come here know.

We work hard, man.

We work hard in the education realm, the political realm, all these different areas, and and I'm an advocate 100% in all of that.

But the most powerful and the most important revolution that our country is longing for right now is a spiritual revolution by the good news of Jesus Christ being proclaimed with power through people like us who are not ashamed.

Verse 17.

For in it, in the gospel, is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith.

So the true gospel breaks the power of shame.

The true gospel makes you unashamed because the true gospel is the power of God.

Thirdly, the true gospel is the righteousness of God.

Not meaning that God is righteous.

That's not what Paul's saying here, though that's true.

He's talking about a righteousness of God that we can experience, that you can experience.

So there are things in your life you cannot be set free from in your own power.

You can try and try, you can discipline your life, and that's important.

Man, I talk about it all the time to the men on Tuesday mornings.

The discipline of life.

But when the righteousness of God invades our heart and our mind, our soul, and our spirit, there's a new capacity.

There's a new dynamite, dynamo, dynamic, dunamis, holy spirit power, that is the righteousness of God that enables us and empowers us to do what we could never do before.

So this verse, verse 17.

Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, reads in 1515, preparing Romans, his study of Romans for the seminary students at Wittenberg, Germany.

And he reads on the margin of the parchment that he was reading from what Augustine had written.

He's an Augustinian monk, he's a scholar of Augustine.

And he reads these words.

The righteousness of God in Romans 1 is not the righteousness of God by which God Himself is righteous, but the righteousness that he freely gives to those who put their faith in Christ.

So men and women, when you truly have put your faith in Christ, you receive the righteousness of God.

That's why being half in, half out in your Christian walk is the worst place to be.

I mean, be a happy pagan, man.

Just party your lungs out.

Because tomorrow you die anyway.

But when you become a Jesus follower and you truly put your faith in him, go all in, man.

Be wholehearted.

Because now you have the righteousness of God living within you.

And every time we compromise, and we do compromise, but when we do compromise and we begin to go back into that old life, your conscience is now alive.

It was dead before.

Now it's alive.

And you can't be totally happy in that stuff that used to make you happy before because you know the righteousness of God in your heart.

And so repent, man.

Repent and go back.

Be wholehearted for Christ.

That's the power of God.

That's the righteousness of God working through you.

So what does he mean by righteousness?

I believe it's three areas.

I think, first of all, it's righteous in your heart.

In other words, there's a righteousness now, a standard within our heart that we know is the right thing to do.

So everybody look at me.

One of the biggest things that we could learn as we prepare for the new year is quit lying.

Just quit lying.

I mean, if we could just take that one thing and for the whole year we're gonna work on, I'm not gonna be, I'm gonna quit lying.

I'm gonna quit exaggerating.

I'm just gonna always tell the truth.

Now, I'm not saying you always tell the truth to a particular person who can't handle the truth, but you still don't have to lie.

I mean, I've been in counseling situations and I know they can't handle the truth.

But I'm not gonna lie.

But I'm gonna help them.

You see, we're gonna help them along.

Help them along.

Because then more truth, a little more truth, a little more truth, set them free.

Set them free.

So it's that.

Secondly, it's it's right relationships relational.

It's relational righteousness.

Think what would happen in our country if we just treated people the way we wanted to be treated.

If we really loved our neighbor as ourselves.

What a, I mean, that would be a revival.

And then thirdly, it's living morally right.

It's not chasing women and chasing men who aren't our husbands or our wives.

It's knowing how to handle our drink.

It's knowing what you should be looking at and not looking at.

See, the righteousness of God changes everything.

That's the gospel.

And so you have to ask yourself, if those things are not regularly happening within your life, you haven't gotten saved yet.

You're not born again.

Especially if it didn't bother you that much.

So let's get saved today.

Let's get born again today.

And some of us have, like me, I mean, I grew up in the church.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't like a pagan or something from a perspective of just sort of a viewpoint of the church.

But it was 18 when I gave it all, man, I became wholehearted for him.

And so, you know, have you given your heart fully to him?

Have you ever got your little navigation device and you're going somewhere and you can't, and you're trying to drive, and you're looking at it to get there, and you get in an intersection, and you can't tell from the dumb navigation device if you're supposed to turn right or sort of go slant over there.

You know, and so you're sitting there, and guys beeping behind you, and this guy over here is getting ready to turn, and you just got you don't know what to do.

That's the way a lot of believers are.

They're double-minded.

They want enough of the world to kind of sewage their pleasures, but not fully wholehearted for Jesus.

And so, because of that, you're in the intersection of your life and you're always ambivalent, and you can't be fearless, and you can't be courageous, and you can't be unashamed because you're riding the fence.

It's the only type of person in all of Scripture where Jesus says, I spew you, I spit you out of my mouth because you're lukewarm.

So Jesus likes hot disciples.

Not the smartest.

Look at your neighbor and just say, I'm not very smart.

Now, everybody already knows that, but you just need to remind yourself of that.

No, he doesn't look for smarts, he doesn't look for socioeconomic abilities, he doesn't look for how great you are or how many degrees you have, he looks for a heart on fire for him.

And I want to challenge you, get on fire for him today.

Move into Christmas, from this point into Christmas and into the new year, fired up for Jesus Christ.

That's righteousness.

So Billy Graham was a young, energetic evangelist in the 1940s, working with a group called Youth for Christ.

And he had just come back from Europe, and he was kind of a rising star among evangelicals.

But there was another guy working alongside Billy Graham, who was seemingly even more anointed than him, and his name was Chuck Templeton.

And Chuck Templeton was just blowing it up, man, everywhere he went.

Never went to college, never graduated from college, but Princeton Seminary offered him the opportunity, they waived all the rules, to come to Princeton and study there.

And so Chuck Templeton began to study at Princeton.

And Chuck Templeton was influenced by the teaching of that time at Princeton called German Higher Criticism.

German Higher Criticism would be what we would classically call liberal theology coming out of Germany.

And so Chuck Templeton, who was very close to Billy Graham, began to write Billy Graham with challenging intellectual concerns he had about the Bible.

Chuck Templeton went from an evangelist to not a Christian to an agnostic to an atheist.

That's the progression of progressive Christianity all the time.

It's never the other way.

Remember what we read?

Remember what we read in 1 Corinthians 15?

According to the scriptures.

When you begin to doubt the scriptures, you will doubt your faith.

When you doubt your faith, you'll doubt God.

When you doubt God, you'll end up, in most cases, an agnostic or an atheist.

So that's what was happening.

And Chuck Templeton is writing Billy Graham.

And so Billy Graham is struggling and he's battling.

Chuck Templet is one of his best friends at the time.

Well, Henry Edameers, who was the Christian education director at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, invited Billy to come and speak at Forest Home in Southern California.

Billy gets there and he's struggling with these questions, and he opens the Bible and he begins to study the Bible day after day while he's at Forest Home.

And as he wrote in his autobiography, I kept coming across this phrase: thus saith the Lord, thus saith the Lord, thus saith the Lord.

And then one night he went out into the forest there.

And he walked and he cried out to God.

And then he writes in his autobiography that he came to a stomp and he cried out to the Lord, Oh God, there are many things in this book I do not understand.

There are many problems with it for which I have no solution.

There are many seeming contradictions.

There are some areas in that I do not seem to correlate with modern science.

I can't answer some of the philosophical and psychological questions Chuck and others are raising.

And then Billy Graham fell to his knees and he said, quote, Father, I'm going to accept this as thy word by faith.

And I will believe this to be your inspired word.

That was 1949.

And from that gathering, he went to the crusade in LA, scheduled for four weeks in a tent, and it went on for eight weeks.

And that was the launching of the power of the gospel through Billy Graham by faith.

And some of you in this room have a similar struggle.

Could be an intellectual or a philosophical struggle.

You will, with study and with analysis, at the end of the day, every question will not be perfectly answered.

And you will have to accept it by faith.

And you'll have to believe God's word.

For I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek.

For in it is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith.

You could follow the law and every aspect of the law perfectly.

And the Apostle Paul, when his name was Saul as a Jew, a Pharisee of Pharisees, realized he would never be good enough.

He would never be perfect enough.

Go to church every time the doors open, never gonna be good enough.

Be a moral, good, wonderful person, but you'll never be good enough.

Faith in Christ is what makes us good enough.

Because you'll never be good enough, but he's good enough.

And he gives us his good enough and he puts it on us.

For by grace you've been saved through faith, not of yourself.

It is a gift of God, not as a result of works that no one should boast.

We put our faith in him and the righteousness of Christ comes, and that's the power of God.

I came home from college, my sophomore year, to a wine and cheese party in Atlanta.

I'm at this wine and cheese party, and this young lady comes up to me and engages me in a conversation.

And in the conversation, she begins to share about her party weekend that she just had.

If I recall, it was Lake Lanier, and um where she had done some pretty interesting things.

And um, so I'm listening to her, and I'm looking for the opening.

Where's the opening?

So I said, Oh, I've I've done I've done way better stuff than you.

And she goes, Oh.

And so I recounted some of my exploits on motorboats and skis and things like that.

And I said, But you know, I don't do that so much anymore.

She goes, why?

And I said, Because last year at the University of Georgia, I gave my heart to Christ.

And I found that the greatest adventure is knowing him personally, and that the greatest adventure is experiencing, say, experiencing him day by day.

I can know God in my life.

And I read the Bible every day, and he speaks to me, and it's really cool.

And she just she's shocked, man.

And she's just sitting there and I could tell the Spirit of God's moving.

I said, Would you like to know him?

Would you like to know Jesus?

I said, Come to my house tomorrow.

Your mom, because I knew this, your mom's coming over, and why don't you come and I want to share a little bit more about this with you.

So she came, and we sat in the living room, and I let her to Jesus.

And then I said, You should come to this Christmas conference that we're doing in Atlanta with a guy named Josh McGowell and check it out.

It's called, it's this thing called apologetics.

And I explained what apologetics was to her.

And she came.

She bought every tape on the table, man, and she drove back to Charleston where she was going to school.

She was born again.

And she started Christian ministry at Charleston.

Later met her husband and walks with Christ today.

That's the power of the gospel, folks.

Thank you for listening to the Foreign for War podcast.

We hope today's message has empowered you to make a difference in your world.

To connect with Pastor Steve's sermons, books, and blogs, visit Steve Holt Online.org.

God bless.