Romans | Introduction - Romans: Book of Revolution

Hey, I'm Pastor 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.

No other book in the Bible has sparked revival, reformation, and revolution like the Book of Romans.

You'll notice the byline across the side, the Book of Revolution.

In 83-86, a young man in North Africa who was already becoming known as a philosopher, as well as being known as a man who lived a life of licentiousness and immorality had already birthed a child out of wedlock with one of his lovers, was in a garden.

While he was in that garden, he heard children playing in the garden and singing out in Latin, Tole Legay.

Tole leg.

Which is translated, take up and read.

Take up and read.

And he came to the lectern there in the garden.

In the middle of the garden was a lectern, and chained to the lectern was a Bible.

And he walked up and he just opened the Bible.

And as he opened the Bible, it fell to Romans 13, 11 through 14.

And do this, knowing the time that now it is high time to awake out of your sleep.

For now our salvation is nearer than when we first believed.

The night is far spent, the day is at hand.

Therefore, let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light.

Let us walk properly as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lust.

And the Spirit of God, mediated through the Word of God in the book of Romans, spoke to this young man's heart, Aurelius Augustine, and he gave his heart to Christ, one of the great philosophers of the church and fathers of the church, who then, through his teaching, an order called the Augustinian order came out of the church.

Almost 1,200 years later, in 1515, an Augustinian monk was about to teach through the book of Romans.

He found a notation from an ancient manuscript of Augustine defining the righteousness of Christ.

Augustine said that when Paul speaks of the righteousness of God in Romans 1, it is not the righteousness by which God himself is righteous, but the righteousness that he freely gives to those who put their faith in Christ.

And for the first time in his life, Martin Luther, whose conscience had been wounded by the burden of the law of God, understood the gospel of Christ.

And it was Romans 1:17 that the just, those who are justified by faith in Christ, shall live by faith.

Romans 1:17

Transformed Martin Luther.

And thus came the revolution of the Protestant Reformation.

On May 24, 1738, a discouraged and depressed missionary named John Wesley entered a Moravian meeting on Aldersgate in London, England.

It was there that he heard Luther's preface to his commentary on the book of Romans.

And he later wrote, Quote, I felt my heart strangely warmed.

I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.

And an assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved from the law of sin and death.

And then John Wesley would go forth and bring forth the great revival in London, which then became the great revival of England, which threw the relationship with a man named Charles Wesley, his brother, and Charles Whitfield, who then was asked to come to America and preach and led to the first great awakening in America.

Swiss commentator Godet, who wrote on the great revivals of history, said, the Reformation was certainly the work of the epistle to the Romans, and it is probable that every great spiritual renovation in the church will always be linked, both in cause and effect, to a deeper knowledge of the book of Romans.

Christmas, one of the great fathers of the church, had the book of Romans read to him twice a week.

Coleridge once said that the epistle to the Romans is the most profound writing that exists.

John Bunyan, who wrote the most widely read Christian book ever outside of the Bible, A Pilgrim's Progress, was transformed while in prison by the book of Romans.

The Epistle of Romans has the most complete diagnosis of man's sin and the most glorious setting forth of the remedy of sin, which is justification by faith.

So turn in your Bibles to Romans 1.17.

And if you're a highlighter or an underliner or a box in the verser, like me, mine's boxed in right there.

And I always like when I'm studying a book, I'll box in what I think is the theme passage for that book, and then I'll write over to the side, theme, so that I know what I believe the book is about.

So Romans 1.17, every commentator would agree, is the theme of Romans.

For in it, and when he says in it, he means the gospel, and we're gonna get into the gospel in my next message.

What is the gospel?

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

The overarching theme of Romans is the righteousness that comes from God, the glorious truth that God justifies the sinner, the guilty, the condemned, by grace alone, through faith alone.

The first 11 chapters present the theological truths of the doctrine, and chapters 12 through 16 detail the practical outworkings in the life of the Christ follower.

The story of this book is that salvation is available to anyone at any stage of sin.

Whatever you have done, wherever you have been, wherever you have lived, there is salvation available through our Savior Jesus Christ, who went to the cross and reconciled us to himself, and when we put our faith and our trust in him, all of his righteousness is poured into our heart, and we have a new heart and a new mind in Christ.

So are you ready to dive into Romans?

All right.

So Romans 1.

Romans 1, 1.

Paul.

That's when we're going to stop right there.

Men and women, we can't truly appreciate the book of Romans without appreciating the author of the book of Romans, a man who before, and we don't know why, and we're not sure exactly how he coined the name Paul.

It's not clear to us.

There's some historical perspectives on that, but his name was Saul.

And Saul studied under the great teacher of the law, Gamalael.

So he had been at the Harvard of Jerusalem.

And he was, you've heard the term anti-Semite, someone who is prejudicial or opposed to Judaism or to Jews.

Saul was a Semite anti.

So he hated anyone that opposed Judaism or the law.

And he felt like that the Jews had a patent on God.

And that and that anybody who even appeared to be like the Jews or came as a sect of the Jews, he would oppose.

And so he became a persecutor of the church in the early part of his life.

A vehement persecutor of the church, hated anyone who opposed Judaism or the law.

And so he went and he began to imprison people.

Matter of fact, he was at, in Acts 6 and 7, he was at the martyrdom of Stephen, the first Christian martyr.

And those that were there seeing what was happening laid their robes at his feet, him giving tacit approval to what had happened.

So I think it would be, it would be neglectful on my part if I didn't give you at least a brief description of how Saul, who would later be called Paul, got saved.

So keep your finger in Romans and let's go to Acts.

So turn left and go to Acts chapter 9.

Acts 9 · chapter mention

And we have a beautiful description by Luke, who traveled with Paul on his missionary journeys, most of them, because probably this is Saul's remembrance of what happened to him.

And then Luke wrote it down.

Chapter 9, verse 1.

Then Saul, still breathing threats and murder.

So I mean, this guy is a true persecutor of the church against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest.

So he becomes an enforcer for the high priest and the rulers of Israel in Jerusalem, and as for letters to be given to him to the synagogue of Damascus, so that if he found any who are of the way, whether men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

Now it's interesting how quickly Christianity has spread.

Christianity's that way.

I mean, when when true revival comes, when true reformation comes, when true revolution comes, Jesus' disciples just start popping up out of everywhere and nowhere.

You can't even believe how far it had already gone.

We believe it had already gone to Rome.

So it's already gone all the way to Rome because we have the book of Romans.

But right here, it's already in Damascus, maybe.

And he's going to find out.

He's going after them.

And he asked for letters after the way, verse 3.

And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly a light shone around him from heaven.

Then he fell to the ground, heard a voice saying to him, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?

And he said, Who are you, Lord?

And then the Lord said, I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.

It is hard for you.

I think it's almost a rhetorical question.

Isn't it hard for you?

It might be another way.

Isn't it hard for you to kick against the goats?

And so the goads were these pencil-like objects that were actually secured under the baseboard of a wagon.

So if an oxen was pulling the wagon forward, no problem with the goats.

But if that if that oxen or that horse began to pull back and discontinue the forward trajectory of the wagon, they would be jabbed back according to the size of the oxen of the horse in the back of the thigh or the calf with this sharp, almost like a needle that would just jab into them and it would just, you know, obviously wake them.

It didn't take very much.

It's like my dogs, you know, if this was happening today, I might you might say, um, it's really hard to run against the invisible fence on the property.

You know, because I've seen my dogs, man, they're they'll book it, they'll see a deer, deer comes jumping over, they go flying, and then they just skid to a stop, probably within inches of that electrical shock that they get on their collar.

And so we don't know what exactly is going on here, except that maybe in the midst of the martyrdom of Stephen, maybe in the murder and in the enslavement of Christians, something's happening in Saul's conscience.

And I don't know, I the the the image I have is of a little girl.

I always think of little girls this way, like a little Christian girl that he might have ripped away from the home with the family, throw him into a dungeon or something, who said, Saul, Jesus loves you.

He died for you on the cross and he cares about you.

And he heard that.

Or maybe it was seeing the vision of Stephen saying that he saw the Lord at the right hand of the Father as he died, as he was being stoned to death.

I don't know.

But there were these things that were happening, they were goads, and God was goading his heart.

Is God goading your heart?

Are there things in your heart that you know God's telling you?

Stop doing that.

Don't go there anymore.

Don't visit that person anymore.

Don't date that person anymore.

Is God pricking at your heart?

Because evidently God was doing that in this persecutor of the church, this terminator, as it were.

And God does that in all of our lives at times.

Not just for salvation, but even as Jesus followers, sometimes we we have that you wake up in the morning and you have that sense of regret, you have that sense of loneliness, that sense of um conviction.

And it can be two ways.

Okay.

It can be the conviction of co-mission or the conviction of omission.

The conviction of co-mission is you're committing things that you know you shouldn't do.

The other is a sin of omission where you know you should be involved in something and you're not.

You you've chosen not to, maybe out of fear, mighty, maybe out of inconvenience.

We'll pick it up, verse six.

So he, trembling and astonished, said, Lord, what do you want me to do?

This guy's a doer.

Saul's a mover and a shaker before he's Paul the mover and shaker.

If you are a leader before you're saved, you're gonna be a leader after you get saved.

God usually doesn't change our personality when we get saved.

He actually sanctifies our personality when we get saved.

For some of us.

I mean, some of us like, whoa.

They're justified, no doubt, but man, there's some need for some sanctification for sure.

I'm the first one, man.

If you only knew the dumb things that I've done as a Christian that are really dumb.

I mean, sometimes I really believe that when I go to the sink in the morning, I'm brushing my f my teeth with shoe polish.

I put my foot in my mouth so many times.

Then the Lord said to him, Arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.

And the men who journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing the voice, but seeing no one.

Then Saul arose from the ground, and when his eyes were open, he saw no one.

So he's blinded.

But they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus, and he was three days without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

Now there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias, and to him the Lord said in a vision, Ananias, and he said, Here I am, Lord.

I mean, that'd be pretty cool.

You know, God says your name.

I mean, Ananias.

Yeah.

And I'm actually like, okay, this is gonna be really good.

Man, it's God, Jesus speaking to me.

So the Lord said to him, Arise and go to the street called straight and inquire at the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus, for behold, he is praying.

And in a vision he has seen a man named Ananias coming in and putting his hand on him so that he might receive his sight.

Now then Ananias has some second thoughts about this.

Then Ananias answered, Lord, I've heard from many about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem.

And here he has authority from the chief priest to bind all who call on your name.

So his reputation really precedes him.

And so even Ananias knows that this persecutor of the church is coming to Damascus.

He doesn't want to go and lay hands on you and tell you that.

But the Lord said, Go, for he is a chosen vessel of mine to bear my name before Gentiles, kings, and children of Israel.

For I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake.

I've always wondered if sometimes the Lord even changes what he was gonna say to kind of accommodate us.

Because, you know, Ananias does not want to have anything to do with Saul.

You can tell it, but he's obviously a really devout guy, and God, Jesus chose him right there to do this.

And then, and then he says, Well, he's gonna suffer a lot.

Okay, I'll go.

All right.

And Ananias went his way and he entered the house, and laying his hands on him, he said, Brother Saul.

So God obviously done a change in Ananias' heart.

The Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road, so obviously he had a vision, and that actually, I think that vision occurred partly was to qualify him to be one of the apostles, because one of the qualifications of the apostles was they had seen Jesus.

And obviously Saul was not one of the original twelve.

Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you came, has sent me that you may receive your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight at once, and he arose and was baptized.

So the rest of the story is that he then, I mean, like the next day, begins to preach the gospel.

So he goes from being the persecutor to the persecuted, and the Jews begin to move in on him.

He has to be whisked away at night because he is um, he was the hunter, and he's now the hunted.

So this is Saul, who later becomes Paul, who's now writing the book of Romans.

Now let's just take a moment and think about this.

Did Saul, who later became Paul, have anything to do with his salvation?

I mean, he is he is on his way.

He has got his strategy and his plan.

He's got a 15-year plan.

He's read Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Affected People, and he is on the move.

And God apprehends him.

And that's why I believe Romans 1.17 is so important, is because he really understood that the justice of God is only discovered when the righteousness of God is poured into you by grace alone.

You cannot earn it.

It's all the work of Christ at the cross, but you have to put your faith in it.

So now let's go back to Romans 1, and it's just phenomenal, Romans 1.1.

So that's all we're going to do today is Romans 1.1.

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

So the first thing that Paul does is he identifies himself not as an apostle, but as a bondservant, doulos, a slave.

Say, I'm a slave of Christ.

I've become a slave of Christ.

And at that time in Rome, there were over six million slaves.

The Romans would have immediately had a picture in their mind as they started to read this letter.

What?

Paul's saying he's a slave.

And they understood that.

I mean, everywhere they shopped, anything that they did, if they needed water, if they needed, if they needed food, if they needed to have someone to pull their horse.

Oh, he's a slave.

Slaves are everywhere.

Six million.

Can you imagine that gang?

Six million in Rome.

Slaves were everywhere.

Dulos, this idea of a slave.

He's saying, I'm a bond servant.

I'm a bond slave of Christ.

Maybe.

Because of him being a Pharisee of Pharisees, and his father had been a Pharisee, he had grown up as a Pharisee, zealous for the law.

Maybe what came to his mind, which they wouldn't have had chapter and verse back back then, but Exodus 21.

It might be that he's indirectly referencing Exodus 21.

Let me read it.

Now these are the judgments which you shall set before them.

If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve you six years.

And in the seventh he shall go out free and pay nothing.

If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself.

If he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him.

If his master has given him a wife, and she has borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her masters, and he shall go out by himself.

But if the servant plainly says, I love my master, my wife, and my children, I will not go out free, then his master shall bring him to the judges.

He shall also bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an owl, and he shall serve him forever.

So there were slaves at that time who so loved their master that it had become such a part of the family that even when it was opportunity for them to go free, chose not to.

They were slaves, they were bond slaves of a master that they loved.

And I believe this might be what Paul is referring to, that he has become a servant, a slave of Jesus Christ, whom he has fallen in love with.

That this is his master, this is his home.

Because, guys, you're all we've all been slaves.

Some of you in this room are still slaves.

The most cruel taskmaster is the slave of sin.

When you are living in sin, whether a believer or not, it's the worst for the believer.

It's the most difficult place to be a believer and know what's right, but be living in sin and letting the cruel taskmaster back into your life who has enslaved you to an addiction or enslaved you to something.

And the reason that's so awful is because we we know enough about Christ to know it's wrong, so we can't fully enjoy it.

We know enough about sin to want to enjoy it, but Christ's spirit living in us won't let us enjoy it.

So I was a happy pagan.

I loved my sin.

I enjoyed sin.

I was the life of the party.

And then I got saved.

And it didn't happen overnight.

I didn't sprout angel wings the next day.

And Charlton Hesson didn't walk in looking like Moses.

But as I began to grow in Christ, I became, and we're gonna come to this in just a moment, I became separated from sin because I was separated to Christ.

And so the joy came.

The story has been told in the hymn, Francis Havergale, one of the great hymn writers, who wrote, I love, I love my master, I will not go out free, for he is my redeemer, he paid the price for me.

I would not leave his service, it is so sweet and blessed, and in the wearied moments, he gives the truest rest.

So the slavery of the bondage of sin can only be broken through Christ.

When we give ourselves to Christ, we begin to find a new bondage.

It's the bondage of being a servant to the master that we love.

So if you're here today and you've never fully surrendered to Christ, you're in bondage to sin, and you can be set free.

The chains can be broken by what Christ did at Calvary, what Christ did at the cross.

If you'll put your faith in his finished, completed work by grace alone, through faith alone, mediated through the word of God alone, it can be set free.

Set free into the joy of the bondage of a master who loves you.

And it's where you are complete.

Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle.

So Paul is first a bondservant and then he's called.

Don't miss the order.

In other words, he's a missionary.

The apostle apostolos means sent out one.

He was a missionary.

Now he is one of the capital A apostles.

He wrote scripture.

But all of us are apostolic.

Every one of you in this room has an apostolic calling on your life.

And I was blessed coming up in the ranks of Campus Crusade for Christ, a missionary all those years.

The caliber of the people I was around was amazing.

And then getting involved in the vineyard movement, the caliber of the pastors I was around was amazing.

But I also went to Fuller Theological Seminary, so I got around professional Christians.

Because I'd never been around professional Christians.

And there's a lot of professional Christians, and they get paid to be Christian, okay?

And so they're professors and their pastors and stuff from different denominations.

And I grew up Lutheran, but I had really, honestly, not been around that many pastors because of the work that I did on the college campuses and everything in Japan and the United States before that, and then the vineyard, of course, those are pastors.

But it was just different, man.

These were Jesus movement pastors who they felt called to something.

They were called in it.

Most of them had left promising careers.

They had left the ranks of financial blessing to the, some, in some cases, almost the destitution of following Christ.

So I'd get around these young people, especially that were going to seminary because their vocation was pastor.

I never thought of the pastorate as being a vocation.

And yet they were looking at salaries, salary packages in really cool churches that they wanted to be at.

And I mean it was so weird.

It's still weird for me when I hear that kind of talk.

Because I've never seen being a pastor as a career.

It's a calling, man.

It's a calling.

I didn't choose Colorado Spring.

I didn't, look, I didn't know anything about Japan except they ate sushi and raw fish.

But I felt called to go to Japan.

I didn't know anything about China when we were smuggling Bibles in China except that it was communist and it was really big and it had a billion people and they were kind of third world and they didn't have Bibles, so we were gonna bring them there.

I knew more about UCLA with this girl that I met who was smuggling Bibles than about China where we were smuggling the Bibles.

But I felt called to do that.

And so if anybody here is a pastor, you're thinking about the pastorate here.

Be sure you're called.

Be sure you're a bond servant first and called second.

But to every one of us in this room, you're called to something.

You're called to some sphere of influence.

It might be just your family, it might be your job, it might be something that God's nestled into your heart that you're not even fulfilling yet.

But you know, in a kind of an intimative way, an intimidation way, maybe even a fear and faith battle.

Oh, I think I'm supposed to do that.

And you're wrestling with that.

That's good.

That's good.

That's the calling of God.

And by the way, you never retire from that, you refire from that.

And so God's, that calling is still on your life.

Whatever your age, there's a call on your life.

And for Paul, it was to be an apostle, to be a missionary to the Gentiles.

Paul, a bond servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to, I like this, separated to the gospel of God.

So from time to time, especially when I was a missionary, people would ask me, don't you feel like you're missing out?

I mean, you're what a great sacrifice you have.

You're gonna be, you've been a missionary.

You're in Japan, you had to learn that language, you have to eat raw fish, you know, all that stuff.

And it's like, I never felt that way.

Liz and I never felt that way.

We never felt we were called away from anything, we felt called to something.

And if you talk to me, and you guys that are sports fanatics, and you ask me questions about the 80s, I don't know anything about what was happening in America.

I know more about sumo wrestling in the 80s than I know about baseball or football.

We were separated to Japan.

We were separated to Christ, bond servants.

So are you.

So are you?

You're not separated from anything, you're separated to something.

You're separated to Christ.

The great Puritan pastor once said, it's the expulsive power of a new affection.

The expulsive power of a new affection.

So you that are married, you remember when you met that one that you love.

No one said to you, Well, you you can't do this and you can't do that.

You couldn't wait to be with that person.

You were separated to her, you were separated to him.

And so it was for Liz and I when we met.

I never thought about what I wasn't doing anymore.

I couldn't, I couldn't not think about what I could do with her.

I couldn't wait to be with her.

It's the expulsive nature of a new affection.

We're separated unto.

The word separated, you may know it because of the Greek word is aphorizo.

Aphorizo, where we get the word horizon.

The transliteration is off horizon.

Have you ever looked out on a high place in the mountains of Colorado and you see that beautiful horizon out there?

That's what it means.

He was separated to a new horizon.

So we sometimes go to Buena Vista.

We sometimes go into Colorado toward fair play.

And when you go across Wilkerson's Pass, you take that crest, you're coming down, you see the collegiate mountain range.

And they're all snow capped.

They're actually snow capped right now.

The collegiate mountain range.

You have a new horizon when you give your heart to Christ.

The old horizons are gone, gang.

If you're an accountant, if you're a scientist, if you're a teacher, if you're a mother, if you're a father, if you're a mechanic, whatever, God's given you now, you're separated unto a new horizon in Christ.

It's the horizon of joy.

It's the horizon of bringing Christ into where you're at.

That's aphorizo.

Separated.

The horizons of Paul had changed.

The joy of the Lord became his strength.

We challenge you here today.

If the joy of the Lord is not your strength most of the time, then you need to rethink your understanding of the gospel and a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Because I believe that the number one quality of the Jesus disciple is joy mediated through love.

And when the love of God flows in you and the joy of the Lord becomes your strength, there is something that gets you up in the morning where we take those first steps because we can't wait to follow Christ.

That doesn't mean we don't go through ebbs and flows and struggles and battles and hard times.

That's all part of the Christian life.

But overarching all that, you're growing in the joy of the Lord.

The great Puritan preacher, Richard Baxter, said, May the living God, who is the portion and rest of the saints, make our carnal minds so spiritual and our earthly minds so heavenly, that loving him and delighting in him may be the work of our lives.

J.I.

Packer in describing Baxter wrote, The hope of heaven brought him joy, and joy brought him strength, and so, like John Calvin before him and George Whitfield after him, and like the Apostle Paul himself, he was astoundingly enabled to labor on, accomplishing more than would ever have seemed possible in a single lifetime.

Jesus follower never gives up anything.

We get everything.

You're a follower of Christ, you should set your spiritual binoculars on the horizon of joy.

And if you're not delighting yourself in joy, start.

Start today as we go into worship, and as the worship team comes up right now, delight yourself in the Lord.

Sometimes we get the order mixed up, and we think more about the desires of our heart than the joy of the Lord.

But the scriptures say the joy of the joy of the Lord will give us to the desires of our heart.

The Westminster Confession of Faith reads, The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Let me read that again.

The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

Gang, look at me.

Heaven is enjoying God forever.

And if you're a Jesus follower, you're truly born again, then eternity already lives in you.

So start practicing for heaven by enjoying him more.

Quit putting the onus on yourself and put the responsibility on him to let his life flow through you and the righteousness of God to make you the disciple that can walk with a joy that sets you free.

And it's an environment that sets others free when they're around you.

Go, man, I like when that guy enters the room.

He brings joy.

We're not all there yet.

But I'm telling you, if we make that our goal, we can be the most joyful church in the city.

You can be the most joyful person in your family.

You can, no matter how hard it is, the joy of the Lord is your strength.

And as we go through Romans, we're going to discover how that works.

Thank you for listening to the Born 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 blog, visit Steve Holtonline.org.

God bless you.