Sermon

[Romans 1.16_17] 2026.06.28 The Roman Road: The Gospel: The Power of God and the Righteousness of God

The Roman Road: The Gospel is The Power of God and the Righteousness of God

1.      Unashamed: The Gospel Is God's Power to Save

2.      Revealed: The Gospel Unveils God's Righteousness

3.      Received: Righteous by Faith, from faith to faith

Big Idea: Don’t be embarrassed by the gospel; it’s God’s power for salvation, and it shows God’s righteousness from faith to faith.

Over the past week, people from all around the world have been watching the World Cup.

Many people, myself included, who don’t usually watch sport, are now giving expert advice on how the game should be played.

I like kicking the ball around every now and then, but I don’t know all the rules of football.

But even I know that sometimes, some footballers might commit an obvious foul and then protest against it.

Or that the rare (or not so rare) footballer would pretend to get seriously injured when the opposing player wasn’t intentional.

And whatever decision the referee makes, there will be strong differences in opinion.

Sometimes, even when they show video footage of what happened, people would still dispute their decision.

Sometimes it’s hard to make the right decision, isn’t it?

How do we know whether we got a decision right?

Every now and then, people would come up to me and ask questions about God.

I would tell them what God says in the Bible.

Sometimes, they would be convinced, but often they would push a little further.

Did God really say that?

That’s the polite response.

Sometimes, they’ll just say, “No, that’s wrong”.

How do we determine whether God is right, or whether we have understood God rightly?

How do we know about God’s rightness (or his righteousness) rightly?

Friends, if you have your Bible there in front of you, please open to Romans 1:16.

We’ll continue our series on Romans Road and we’ll see three things in today’s passage:

1.      Unashamed: The Gospel Is God's Power to Save

2.      Revealed: The Gospel Unveils God's Righteousness

3.      Received: Righteous by Faith, from faith to faith

How do we know about God’s righteousness?

Let’s pray and ask God for his help.

“Heavenly Father, please open up our minds and our hearts that we may understand your word rightly, for Jesus’ sake, Amen.”

1. Unashamed: The Gospel Is God's Power to Save

Look with me at Romans 1:16, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel”.

What a strange way for Paul to begin talking about the gospel.

Why would anyone be ashamed of the gospel?

Some Bible translations, including our Chinese translation, don’t have the word “For” in the verse, but this word is the clue to understanding why Paul would say that.

The word “For” links this verse with what Paul had just been saying.

He has just described how he saw the gospel of God, the good news about Jesus Christ, as the message that God had spent thousands of years preparing.

And Paul was so excited to hear that there were people in Rome who heard the Gospel and believed in Jesus, that he wrote this very letter, the letter to the Romans, to tell them that he was preparing to travel thousands of kilometres to see them and to encourage them in their trust of Jesus Christ.

To those who didn’t believe in the same gospel as Paul, it probably looked like madness.

At the very least, it would look like foolishness.

Why would anyone give up so much of their lives for this so-called gospel of God?

You need to remember that at that time, Christianity was not a well-known religion among the many religions of the world.

There were big temples dedicated to the Greek gods and the Roman gods.

There were sun gods and mountain gods that people dedicated their lives to.

These were impressive religions with an impressive following.

Even for those who were not particularly religious, there were philosophers who had sophisticated descriptions of what life was all about.

The people were far more impressed with the philosophers’ speeches and their message than the Christian’s message about the death and resurrection of Jesus, which would’ve sounded bizarre to most of the people in Paul’s day.

In comparison, the gospel seemed weak and embarrassing.

Of course, this wasn’t just the case back in first century Rome.

This is still the case in many parts of the world today.

In multicultural Sydney, we have many different religions and many worldviews that at first glance seemed far more sophisticated than the gospel of God.

I remember speaking to a guy about beliefs and he said that he believed in Jesus, but he also believed in another god as well.

In his mind, what he had was more sophisticated, and frankly, better than Christianity.

He would even use the Bible to try to show how foolish the Bible was.

I remember him quoting a Bible verse, which I knew didn’t exist.

I told him the verse didn’t exist but he wouldn’t believe me.

He then got his phone out to search and got really angry at me when he realised that he was wrong, even though I told him all along that the verse wasn’t there.

Though he might have tried to embarrass me, he ended up embarrassing himself.

Though many people in the world have many reasons to try to embarrass Christians about our faith, Christians can stand firm in our faith.

We don’t have to be embarrassed.

We don’t have to be ashamed of the gospel.

Why?

Look at verse 16 again with me, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek.”

Despite how the gospel might look to the world, the gospel is the power of God.

The gospel is not merely an inspiring message, or even a sophisticated message.

It’s not advice on how you can make a better world or a self-help book on how you can be a better person.

The Gospel is the Power of God.

It’s the Gospel that transforms us and empowers us.

The gospel doesn’t tell us how to help ourselves, the gospel helps us, lifts us up when we have no power to lift ourselves up.

The Gospel of God is the Power of God.

The Bible teaches us that all things are made by the power of God.

The gospel of God is that very same power at work, and the goal for this work of God’s power is for salvation.

It’s the gospel that gives us life and hope.

It’s the gospel that makes us thirst for hope, when we had none.

Just as a dead person has no thirst for water, someone who is spiritually dead has no thirst for God.

Having no desire for God, having no love for God, is the default position of the human heart, for all of us are born with a spiritually dead heart.

We can’t develop a thirst for God any more than a corpse can develop a thirst for life.

However, whenever the Gospel of God is uttered, proclaimed, taught and shared, God powerfully brings about new life.

People are saved from spiritual deadness to spiritual life.

That happens for, according to verse 16, everyone who believes, first for the Jew and also for the Greek.

When someone believes the gospel of God, the gospel about the Lord Jesus Christ, that person is transformed, not from a bad person to a good person, but from a dead person to a living person.

When someone believes the Gospel of God, that person experiences the Power of God.

God doesn’t require you to perform some incredible feat before you experience his power.

You don’t need to pass a certain test, be in an elite group, or even be a good person before you can experience his power.

The power of God is available to all, first to Jews, and also to the Greeks (everyone else who’s not a Jew).

It’s available for everyone, even if you are a bad person, even if you have been rejected by your friends and family.

The Power of God for salvation is available for all, but those who would come must come through trusting in the Gospel of God.

The Gospel of God is the Power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

Earlier this week, I heard the story of a Christian father called Matthew West who went on a camp with his daughter with other parents and children.

During one of the exercises, the daughters were blindfolded and the dads were told to guide them through the woods after repeating three rules: I will never leave you.

You can ask me anything.

And only listen for my voice.

It was easy at first.

But after a while, the counsellor told Matthew to remove his hand.

He was then not allowed to speak until the daughter remembered rule 2 “You can ask me anything”.

The blindfolded daughter didn’t hear from her Dad, so she didn’t know where to go.

The counsellor then started speaking.

But instead of leading her out of the woods, she was leading the daughter further away from the path.

The daughter forgot rule 3, which was, “Only listen to her father’s voice”.

After a while, the daughter remembered rule 1 and asked, “Dad, are you there?”

At this, Matthew replied, with tears in his eyes, “Yeah. I’m here.”

The daughter needed to be reminded that she could trust her Dad to lead her to safety and that she needed to trust his voice.

Whenever we hear the Gospel of God, it’s God, the Heavenly Father, speaking to us.

God loves us and wants us to move from death to life.

We can trust in him.

We can trust his words.

His words are more powerful, more loving, than the words of any father here on earth.

For while our earthly fathers can guide us on the right path with their words, the word of God gives us the power to walk the right path.

That’s why we’re not ashamed of the gospel of God, for it’s the Power of God, the Power of our heavenly Father, who uses the words of his gospel for our salvation.

2. Revealed: The Gospel Unveils God's Righteousness

The Gospel of God is the Power of God for salvation.

In the Gospel of God, we also see God’s righteousness revealed.

Look with me at verse 17, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.”

In the Gospel of God, we see that God’s righteousness, his rightness, in the way that he saves us.

While we might not use the word righteousness a lot in our world, the concept of righteousness is always there.

For example, on Friday, Australia played against Paraguay in the World Cup.

For about 24 hours before, there were a lot of questions in the news about whether it was right to make Friday a public holiday to watch the match or not.

The official answer was no, but I’m sure there were many businesses and schools that took some time off to watch the game.

There would be people who think it was right to watch the game and others who didn’t think so.

And it’s ok to have different opinions about the appropriateness or the rightness of it all.

There are some things that we can have different opinions of.

However, there are other things that aren’t just matters of opinions.

Getting these things wrong will lead to catastrophic results.

Changing lanes without thinking or signalling can lead to serious accidents.

Giving a patient the wrong diagnosis can lead to the wrong treatments.

You don’t want to get these wrong.

One of the most important things, if not the most important thing, you don’t want to get wrong, is about what we understand about God’s righteousness, God’s rightness.

People can have all sorts of opinions about God’s righteousness.

Some think that God is right when he does this, and wrong when he does that.

God is good if he does these sorts of things but bad if he doesn’t.

We make ourselves the judge when it comes to God’s righteousness.

But how do we come up with our judgement?

How do we come up with the rules to judge God’s character?

And why are those rules valid?

You see, whenever we come up with rules to think about whether God is right, we try to squeeze God into our own moral framework.

If he fits, then he’s good.

If he doesn’t fit, then he’s bad.

In reality, it’s actually the other way around.

God is good, his righteousness is perfect, his moral framework is truly righteous.

It’s us who don’t fit into his moral framework, it’s us who are not right.

And it’s not a mutual disagreement; it’s not a matter of agreeing to disagree.

Even that framework is flawed.

Why would we think that our moral framework is even worth comparing to God’s?

God is God and we’re not.

Whatever moral framework any man comes up with is flawed.

Just ask any man, or woman.

If we dig a little deeper, we can all see the flaws in our own framework for righteousness.

And you know what, God sees all the flaws in all our frameworks for righteousness.

God, who is perfectly good and perfectly righteous, has a vastly different moral framework of righteousness than ours.

And so, what is it?

What’s God’s framework of righteousness?

We see the righteousness of God in the Gospel of God.

We cannot discover God’s righteousness on our own.

If we are to see God’s righteousness, God himself must reveal it to us.

And he has revealed it to us in his Gospel, the Gospel about his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

In the Gospel of God, we see what it means to be right with God, to fit perfectly in the moral framework of God.

In the Gospel of God, we see that to be a right person in God’s eyes is to love him with all of our heart, all of our soul, all of our mind, and all of our strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves.

And none of us could do it.

As long as there is a part of us that loves ourselves, others, and things above God, then we are not right, we don’t fit in God’s moral framework.

However, the concept of the righteousness of God here is more than a reference to God’s own moral framework.

If it is, then the Bible would say that the righteousness of God is revealed in the law of God.

But what does the Bible say?

The righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel of God.

In the gospel of God, we do see the moral framework of God, but we also see what God did to save all of us who don’t fit in God’s moral framework, that is, every man and woman who has ever lived.

God sent his Son, perfect in righteousness, to die for those who are unrighteous, in order to make us righteous before God.

That’s the righteousness of God.

The righteousness of God is seen in the righteous way in which he’s sent his Son to save those who would believe in Him.

There is righteousness in what God did to save people like us!

If you want to see God’s righteousness, if you want to see what God thinks is right, if you want to see what God did to make things right, to make us right, he can show it to you in the Gospel.

One person who was wrong about the righteousness of God was a young Martin Luther.

He was a Roman Catholic monk who read the Bible a lot and who knew that he wasn’t good enough for God.

When he thought about God’s righteousness, he thought about how God hated him and would punish his sins.

Though he was a monk, on the inside, he was angry against God.

One day, he was reading through this very passage we’re reading, Romans 1:16-17, and had a new understanding.

He said, “There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely, by faith. And this is the meaning. The righteousness of God is revealed by the Gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith. I felt that I had been born anew and that the gates of heaven had been opened.”

Luther recognised that in the gospel, righteousness of God is what he gave to those who had put their trust in Jesus.

That is, for those who had put their trust in Jesus, God justifies, God makes them right, so that they’re now right with God himself.

How certain are you about God’s righteousness?

Do you know God’s righteousness?

If you want to find out more, please see either me after Church or Jerry at the Welcomers’ tent.

We would love to talk more with you about it.

Also, if you are a young adult, join En Bo’s Discover Class afterwards to find out more.

3. Received: Righteous by Faith, from faith to faith

The Gospel of God is the Power of God.

The Gospel of God is the Righteousness of God, and it is received by faith.

To receive the gospel by faith means to trust in what God has said, and to let the words of His Gospel give us the power to live the kind of righteous life he wants us to live.

What does the Bible mean by saying the gospel is revealed from faith to faith?

Whenever we use the words from something to something, we generally mean that there’s a movement of some sort, from here to there, from down to up, from nothing to something.

In these two verses, there’s a movement of faith from one place to another.

Paul had just talked about how the gospel of God is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes, first to the Jews, then to the Greeks.

And so, it makes sense to see that when he was talking about the righteousness of God being from “faith to faith”, he’s talking about the movement of faith from the Jews to the Greeks (that is, everyone else).

The Bible tells us that Jesus is the centre of the gospel of God; it’s through trusting in him, putting our faith in him, that we come to know the righteousness of God.

Who were the first people to know God’s righteousness in the Gospel of God about Jesus?

The disciples, who happened to be Jews.

They believed in Jesus and Jesus sent them out to tell other people about him.

The disciples told the Gospel of God to the Jews first, some of whom believed.

Over time, they started telling people who weren’t Jews, and some of them also believed.

Those who had heard the gospel, both Jews and Greeks, started to tell the gospel to other people.

And so, the gospel continued to spread, from the faith of one, to the faith of another.

Throughout the whole process, faith is at the centre of it all.

You have to trust God about what he said about Jesus in order to be saved.

And the way God makes that happen is by the proclamation of the gospel of God, which is the power of God.

This wasn’t a new concept.

God had revealed it long ago in the Old Testament.

You see this in the last phrase of the Bible, “just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith”.

Those who have put their trust in Jesus, who had been made right according to God’s righteousness, won’t perish.

They will live.

They will be born again, living not for themselves but for him who died for them, that is, Jesus Christ.

This is what our Church lives for.

We are a Church that wants to be a place where you see the Gospel in action, where you hear the Gospel preached, where you believe the Gospel by putting your trust in Jesus, where you get to tell the gospel to other people.

We are a church that wants the gospel to continue to spread from faith to faith, where the faith of a KOGKids teacher will lead to the faith of a KOGKids Kid, where the faith of an ATONED leader will lead to the faith of an ATONED young adult.

We are a 915 Church.

In Acts 9:15 we read that God called Paul to be his chosen instrument to take God’s name to Gentiles, kings, and Israelites.

By God’s grace, we pray that God would use us to take God’s name, as revealed in the gospel of God, to English speakers of all backgrounds, to our local leaders, and to English speakers of our own background.

Who knows, God might use us to take the gospel to people who speak other languages.

Whatever it is, our prayer is that the gospel of God will not stop with us and that we won’t stop the gospel.

Our prayer is that everyone who comes to our Church will see a glimpse of the life that God’s given us in Christ.

915, friends, would you join us in prayer, your prayers and your deeds, to be the Church, to be the kind of generation that God seeks?

Would you live by faith, trusting Jesus, remembering that he will never leave you, that you can ask him anything, and that you will only listen for his voice.

How do you know about God’s rightness (or righteousness)?  

We know it if we know the Gospel of God, for in the gospel of God, God reveals his righteousness, in saving people like us.

In the gospel we praise God for his righteousness, for the gospel of God is the power of God for salvation.

Don’t be embarrassed by the gospel; it’s God’s power for salvation, and it shows God’s righteousness from faith to faith.

Here are three questions for us to think about:

1. When are you tempted to shame other Christians for trusting the God of the gospel?

2. What does God’s righteousness look like during the week?

3. How are you passing on the faith you received to someone else?

Friends, don’t be embarrassed by the gospel; it’s God’s power for salvation, and it shows God’s righteousness from faith to faith.

Let’s pray, “Father, we thank you for giving us your gospel, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Please forgive us when we see things like the world, and we’re tempted to be ashamed of the gospel. Please forgive us for the greater sin of being like the world, shaming others who are trusting you according to the gospel. Please shape us by your Holy Spirit, and reveal your righteousness to us. Please empower us, embolden us to live a life of obedience and on the faith we received, that your righteousness might be revealed, from faith to faith. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.”