The Power of the Gospel: Hope and Redemption

Devotional

Sermon Summary

Bible Study Guide

Sermon Clips

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” [00:00:44]

“Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.” [00:20:00]

“Adam and Eve, instead of trusting God—you can read it for homework—instead of trusting God, they believed a lie. They believed a lie. And as a result of that, the world was no longer as God had made it but now became the world as man had spoiled it by sin.” [00:06:22]

“Now, what we’re doing here in the second half of Romans 1 is essentially viewing God’s world through the lens of God’s Word. We’re looking to the Word of God to explain the world of God. Or, better still, we are seeking to see the world in light of the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ.” [00:09:35]

“Now, this is something that is largely unpalatable. You don’t hear much of it in the press. You won’t, certainly, hear it in many congregations, because everybody wants to be liked and to be affirmed, and that’s true of the pastors as well. And so why get into stuff like this?” [00:11:29]

“God’s response to giving them up is not arbitrary. It’s not random. He is giving them up to what they have chosen. You will notice that he ‘gave them up in the lusts of their hearts.’ ‘In the lusts of their hearts.’ The things that they craved for, the things that they longed for in place of him, they were being given over to.” [00:23:15]

“Now, if you think about this, just take any cultural period that you have lived through, and view the unfolding of things. Take the 1960s, for example: God is dead. God is dead. So what goes in his place? Whatever we want. And what happens is that we create idols of our own making.” [00:25:21]

“Let me finish in this way: three Ps. Three Ps. The response of the life that becomes aware of God’s amazing grace is, first of all, the response of penitence. Penitence. It was in the ’80s or ’90s that the people that started selling those things to hang around your neck—once you get to our age, my age, you’re supposed to have it in the bathroom in case you fall down, and the bell goes off.” [00:44:28]

“Response number two: praise. Look at how he finishes with a little, mini doxology: ‘Bless God. The Lord is blessed forever and ever.’ He says, ‘You know, no matter how much people dishonor things, they cannot ultimately rob God of his honor and of his glory.’” [00:45:34]

“God hands us over to disordered desires that end, eventually, in tragedy and in death. Every funeral that I’ve done for addicts—if you had spoken to them before they took that final dose, they would tell you, ‘I’m actually now held in a grip that I cannot liberate myself from. This has been my longing. This has been my craving. This has been my everything.’” [00:42:09]

“The lie is that God is a cosmic killjoy. The lie is that the things we choose to serve will set us free. The lie is that, for example, we were never made for monogamy. Just yesterday, in The Times, I read an article—a pathetic article—by an Oxford graduate entitled ‘Half the Fun of Married Life Is the Infidelity.’” [00:43:05]

“Now, we need to stop. But notice, 25: ‘They exchanged the truth about God for a lie.’ In other words, it’s Genesis. Notice something carefully: all the uncleanness is not the cause of God’s wrath; it is the evidence of his wrath. He gave them up to that which they had already determined was their idol, was their success, was their significance.” [00:40:06]

Ask a question about this sermon