Gift of Grace #1 - The Truth Before Us
Description
In this message, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund explores Romans 1:1-17 to reveal the gospel as God's good news that we cannot earn righteousness through our own efforts—Jesus paid the price to make us clean and restore our relationship with the Father. Discover how moving from obligation to eagerness about this truth can transform not only how you see yourself, but how you engage with the world around you.
Summary and Application
We all come into a new year hoping for something better. Whether it's a health concern, financial stress, or a struggling relationship, we find ourselves thinking, "If I could just get some good news in this area, things could be different." As Kurt opened his message on Romans, he pointed to a surprising cultural touchstone—country artist Shaboozey's song that captures this universal longing: "I need some good news / Sitting here sipping on the cold truth / Nobody knows what I'm going through / All I really need is a little good news."
That longing for good news is exactly what the Book of Romans is about. But it's not just any good news—it's the good news of God.
The Gospel: Good News From God
The word "gospel" can feel churchy and distant, but it simply means "good news." Paul opens his letter by identifying himself as one "set apart for the gospel of God—the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son" (Romans 1:1-3).
As Kurt explained, this good news has three essential qualities: it's from God, it's promised in Scripture, and it's about Jesus Christ. This isn't a self-help message or a set of moral guidelines—it's the announcement of what God has done to rescue us.
Paul goes on to say, "For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: 'The righteous will live by faith'" (Romans 1:17). The good news is that God gives us a righteousness we could never achieve on our own.
Four Responses to Sin
To illustrate humanity's different responses to sin and the gospel, Kurt shared Max Lucado's "Parable of the River." In the story, a king warns his sons not to touch a river of toxic mud. Four sons disobey and become covered in the filth. The father offers them a choice: work to clean themselves (though they'll never get fully clean) or let him pay the price to have them cleaned.
The four sons represent four common responses:
The first son builds a hut far from the palace, living independently in his filth. This represents those who reject God entirely, building their own life apart from Him.
The second son scrubs and scrubs but can never get fully clean. He represents those who try to earn their way to God through good works, always feeling slightly unworthy.
The third son compares himself to others, stacking rocks for every person he's cleaner than. He represents those who find righteousness in comparison, feeling good about their relative morality.
The fourth son accepts his father's offer to pay the price for his cleaning. He represents those who accept the gospel—that Jesus paid the price for our sin so we could be completely clean and restored to relationship with the Father.
As Kurt emphasized, "What the gospel says is that the father is willing to pay the price for us to be completely clean. And that's what Jesus did on the cross."
Living Out the Good News
Once we've received this good news, how should we respond? Paul gives us three "I am" statements that reveal his posture toward the gospel:
"I am obligated" (Romans 1:14) - Paul says his obligation is "to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish." The good news isn't just for people like us or people we prefer. It's universal.
"I am eager" (Romans 1:15) - Paul doesn't just fulfill an obligation grudgingly. He's eager to share this message because he knows what's at stake. Ray Ortlund's prayer captures this urgency: "O Lord, how trivial are my aspirations and desires. I pursue the amusements and toys of carnality of the modern world while the higher longings of my soul weaken from neglect...O Lord, let me spend my life for you, disregarding all risk and accepting all consequences."
"I am not ashamed" (Romans 1:16) - Paul declares, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes." Kurt challenged us with a simple example: When someone asks about your weekend, do you mention church? Or do you list everything else while conveniently leaving out that you spent time worshiping the God of the universe?
Andrew Murray put it starkly: "The emotion of shame with reference to the gospel betrays unbelief in the truth, and the absence of shame is proof of faith."
Where Do You Stand?
Kurt concluded by bringing it back to each of us: "This is what our world needs more desperately than anything else: people aligning their lives with the God of the universe, which we do when we believe the gospel."
The question isn't whether you need good news—we all do. The question is whether you'll receive the good news God offers: that Jesus paid the price to make you clean and restore your relationship with the Father.
Questions for Reflection
Which of the four sons in the parable most closely resembles your natural response to sin? Are you building your own hut, trying to scrub yourself clean, stacking up comparison rocks, or accepting the Father's gift of grace?
When it comes to sharing your faith, where do you find yourself—obligated but reluctant, genuinely eager, or somewhere in between? What specific step could you take this week to move toward Paul's posture of being "not ashamed" of the gospel?
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Ray Ortlund
"O Lord, how trivial are my aspirations and desires. I pursue the amusements and toys of carnality of the modern world while the higher longings of my soul weaken from neglect. What do I remove from my life in order to throw myself without reserve or impediment into the great cause of the gospel? O Lord, let me spend my life for you, disregarding all risk and accepting all consequences."
Andrew Murray
"The emotion of shame with reference to the gospel betrays unbelief in the truth, and the absence of shame is proof of faith."
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Opening Prayer
Good morning. Happy New Year. It's great to be together. Let's pray.
God, as we're gathered today, I ask that you would speak into each of our lives. If I've prepared things that don't reflect you well, I pray you'd prompt me away from them in this moment. And God, if there are things that would be beneficial to those of us who are here that I haven't prepared, I pray you'd also prompt me in that direction in these moments and that we would walk away from this time just drawn closer to you. And we pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.
The Search for Good News
I want to begin today with an astute cultural commentator of our time, Shaboozey. If you don't know who Shaboozey is, good for you. Shaboozey is an artist, maybe country-ish. I think he might push back on that, but he became well known for his music. And his second song that has gotten a lot of play is called "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" or "I Need Some Good News."
The idea of the song is basically he's singing and he says, you know, "I need to get away from the old me, no one told me this life would be easy." So his chorus is:
I need some good news
Sitting here sipping on the cold truth
Nobody knows what I'm going through
All I really need is a little good news
Is a little good newsThe basic idea of the song is this: my life is hard and if I could just get something to be right, something to be good news, it would give me a little bit of hope and let me move forward today with where I am.
I don't know how you come to a new year, but my guess is many of us come saying, "If I could just get this one thing to be better, if there's this place where I could experience some good news, then things could be different. It would be more encouraging. It would be a better year." It might be around a health concern, it might be around your finances, a relationship that is somehow not going the direction that you wish it were going. You say, "If I could just get some good news, that's what I need."
Introducing Romans: The Gift of Grace
Well, today, as you heard, we're beginning a series on the Book of Romans. We'll actually work our way through the Book of Romans over the bulk of this next year. And we're actually going to do it in three different series.
The first series we're going to call the Gift of Grace, and that will cover Romans chapters 1-5. And then we'll do a second series that we'll call the Experience of Grace, which will be chapters 6-11, and then chapters 12 through the end will be the Implications of Grace.
The reason we'll do it that way is for those of you who are committed to being here throughout the year, you can just say, "Hey, it's Romans for a long period of time." And it'll be good because you'll get most of your faith right. But we'll do multiple series so that as people come throughout the year they can say, "Okay, I didn't miss everything. This can be enough of a standalone."
If I were to summarize what Romans is about in just a simple word, I would say it's gospel. The reason I say this is because the way the book starts and the way the book reads is it's concerned largely with a word that if you've been around here, you've heard quite a bit. But again, if you haven't been around, the word feels churchy and distant. And the word I'm talking about is gospel.
Here's Romans 1, verses 1 and 2:
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for the gospel of God—the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David...
Now when I hear that, even having been around the Bible and church a long time, there's a little bit of a distance to that because you say, "Ah, the gospel of God, that's a church thing, whatever that is." But gospel is a word that means good news. That's what it literally means. And so he's saying this is about the good news of God.
The Truth Before Us: Understanding the Good News
What I'd like to do today is talk about this good news in two categories. The first is the truth that's before us, which is the good news of God. And then what happens when that truth is within us.
The Good News Is From God
The truth before us we find in verses 1-13. First, it's the gospel or the good news that's from God. This same thing shows up in verse 17 where it says:
For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."
We see in verse 2 that it's from the Bible, it's from scripture, it's not new—it's from the prophets, promised beforehand. It says that it's through the Holy Scriptures and that it's about Jesus because it's regarding his Son. So the good news of God that we need is from God, it is promised in the scriptures, and it is about Jesus Christ.
A Brief Academic Detour: Understanding Romans Correctly
Now if you weren't already like, "Okay, get to where you have your hook for whatever this is," give me a moment because I want to dive into the weeds for a second on something that a few of you will understand. If you are like, "What are you talking about?" part of my role is to be aware of some things that hopefully I can help you be aware of. So when you read and understand stuff, hear people talk about it, you have a rubric for it.
What I'm talking about is in academic circles, there's a pretty big debate these days about how to read the book of Romans. And it's between people who would hold to what's called the New Perspective on Paul and the Reformed perspective or the traditional take on the whole thing. There's been some pretty heavyweight scholars who've lined up on both sides of this debate. N.T. Wright has been the author who has kind of put forward this idea of the New Perspective on Paul. John Piper has pushed back on him pretty strongly with a book called The Future of Justification.
Now, like I said, some of you are like, "What? Who cares?" Okay, hang with me for a second.
N.T. Wright and others who have put forward this idea of the New Perspective on Paul basically say that in the book of Romans we read it wrong because we've read it as being about individual justification before God, about being made right with God. And they say it's about communal expectations. It's about having boundary markers in community and people who are being excluded who should be included. And it's not really about individual salvation.
John Piper wrote his response to this and said this is a dangerous view because the whole idea of Romans is about what makes a person right with God.
Now again you may say, "Okay, what's the point?" I tend to agree more with John Piper if I had to choose between the two, even though I like both authors on the whole. Douglas Moo, who is one of my seminary professors who has probably devoted most of his life to studying Romans—he's written three commentaries on the book—has a section on this whole thing. And he basically says that unfortunately these two views have been pitted against each other, that the Book of Romans is about individual salvation primarily, but the secondary issues are the issues that come from this New Perspective.
This will all become clear as we work through this over the weeks. We'll probably do a podcast on this for those of you who are interested in more detail. But what Moo says is that if you make these secondary issues primary, you can lose the primary issue, which is: How are we made right with God?
The Parable of the River
In order to help set this up, I want to give you a story or a parable that introduces the first three chapters of Romans. This comes from Max Lucado, who several years ago in one of his books on the Book of Romans wrote what he calls the Parable of the River.
Here's basically his story: There was once a king who lived in a beautiful palace in a beautiful land. And he had five sons. And while they were living there, there was one restriction that he had for his sons, which was: As you're living your life in this beautiful land, just don't go near the river that runs near the castle. He said, "I don't want you to touch it. You can look at it, but don't go near it, because that is my restriction."
The oldest son was obedient and didn't go near the river, didn't touch the river. But the four younger sons were drawn to the river and found themselves playing near its edge. And then they touched it. And as they did, they realized that the river water was not water but was actually very toxic mud. And the four sons got covered in this toxic mud. And they immediately went back to their father and said, "Father, what do we do? We're covered in this toxic mud."
And the father said, "Well, you have two choices. One is you can work to try to get this mud off of you. And if you work hard enough at it, you could probably get most of it off, but some of it will stick and you'll never get it all off. Or I can pay the price to have somebody clean you."
Well, the four brothers took very different routes. The first son said, "I don't need to be cleaned. I'm going to go and just live with this mud on me. I'm going to live far from the palace." And he went and built himself a little hut and he lived in that hut.
The second son said, "I'm going to work on trying to get clean." And he scrubbed and he scrubbed and he scrubbed. And he got most of the mud off, but he could never get all of it off. And so he lived his life always feeling a little bit dirty, a little bit unclean.
The third son said, "Well, I'm going to compare myself to other people." And he looked around and he said, "You know what? I'm cleaner than that guy. I'm cleaner than that person." And he spent his life collecting rocks to represent every time he was cleaner than somebody else. And he stacked those rocks up and felt pretty good about himself.
But the fourth son went to his father and said, "Father, I need you to pay the price for me to be cleaned." And the father paid the price. And the son was made completely clean and was able to come back into relationship with his father and live in the palace.
Application of the Parable
Now, the point of the parable is simply this: The river represents sin and the toxic mud represents the effects of sin in our lives. And what happens is we have different responses to sin.
Some people say, "I'm just going to live my life far from God. I'm going to build my own hut. I'm going to do my own thing. I don't need God. I don't need the church. I don't need any of this."
Some people say, "I'm going to work really hard to try to be a good person, to try to clean myself up." And you can work really hard at it, but you'll never get it all off. You'll always feel a little bit unclean.
Some people say, "Well, I'm going to compare myself to other people. I'm better than that person. I'm not as bad as that person." And they spend their life collecting rocks, feeling good about themselves because of their relative goodness.
But what the gospel says is that the father is willing to pay the price for us to be completely clean. And that's what Jesus did on the cross. He paid the price for our sin so that we could be made completely clean and come back into relationship with the Father.
That's the good news. That's the gospel. And that's what Paul is talking about here in Romans.
The Truth Within Us: Our Response to the Good News
So how do we respond to this truth? What happens when this truth moves from being before us to being within us?
Paul gives us his response in three "I am" statements in verses 14-17.
I Am Obligated (Verse 14)
First, in verse 14, he says:
I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish.
He's saying, "My obligation is universal. It's not just to the people I like."
Maybe a way to think about this is if you were to be part of a project to bring water to a village in a place in the world that doesn't have clean drinking water. And you know how significant that can be. You wouldn't say, "I'm going to do it only to the houses of the people I like." What he's saying is, "No, you're obligated to bring this to everybody who is around you as you move."
I Am Eager (Verse 15)
His second "I am" statement is in verse 15:
That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are in Rome.
So now he says, "Not only am I obliged, but I'm eager. I want to take this message to people." Because again, if you understand what's at stake, then what you're doing is bringing something that is life-giving.
This would be again, to use the water supply analogy, as if you were to say, "I brought water to a community, but I'm not going to tell anybody about it because, you know, come get it if you want it."
Ray Ortlund in his book writes a prayer about this verse. Here's what he writes:
O Lord, how trivial are my aspirations and desires. I pursue the amusements and toys of carnality of the modern world while the higher longings of my soul weaken from neglect. What do I remove from my life in order to throw myself without reserve or impediment into the great cause of the gospel? O Lord, let me spend my life for you, disregarding all risk and accepting all consequences.
When I read that, I thought it's easy to let our lives be about all kinds of things rather than the good news. Even when we talk about the New Perspective, one of the things that in a way it allows for is a little bit of saying, "Well, okay, this is just about community engagement. It's not about the centrality of the good news."
If I were to push this water analogy for a village a little further, it'd be a little bit like a village without clean water saying, "We're going to help serve the village. We're going to set up a nice playground for the kids to play on." Well, they don't have clean water. And what Paul is doing here is he's saying, "I'm eager for this because I know that this is what makes a radical difference for the people who believe."
I Am Not Ashamed (Verses 16-17)
So he says, "I'm under obligation. I am eager." And then in verses 16 and 17, he has his third "I am" statement:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes: first to the Jew, then to the Gentile. For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."
Now, this "righteousness of God" phrase here is a big phrase. It shows up several times throughout the book of Romans. We will unpack it more in the weeks ahead. But here what he's focusing on is he's saying the good news is the righteousness that God gives to us. He quotes Habakkuk 2:4 and he says that it's by faith. And here it says "from first to last." The phrase in the original is "from faith to faith." He's saying it is all faith. That is what it is.
But notice he starts by saying, "I am not ashamed."
So many times what happens with Christians is we can say, "Well, I'm not that kind of Christian like that person." Or "I don't like the message, especially when it feels like it's exclusive and tells people that they have to believe in order to have salvation." And so we can shrink back.
What Paul is doing here is he's saying, "I want you to know that there's no shame in me because I know this is the message that brings life. It's the righteousness of God for those who believe."
Andrew Murray, an author of another generation, put it like this:
The emotion of shame with reference to the gospel betrays unbelief in the truth, and the absence of shame is proof of faith.
He goes so far as to say if you find yourself ashamed to identify as a Christian—and this is another reason why participating in church life is important—he says if you find yourself embarrassed to identify in any way, it's evidence that you don't actually believe. But if you find yourself willing to acknowledge Jesus and his ways, he says it's proof that God has worked inside your life.
What Does Boldness Look Like Today?
Now you may say, "Well, there's not a lot of opportunity to be bold with my faith. What does boldness look like today?" That could be a big conversation. Maybe here's just a real simple minimum:
When somebody at work or school says to you, "How was your weekend?" and you list 10 things that your weekend was but you conveniently leave church out, is that not a way of just kind of saying, "Well, you know, I spent part of a day worshiping the God of the universe, celebrating the gift of grace, but it's irrelevant to my weekend compared to I watched some guys in gold pants lose to guys in purple pants"?
My point is just to say, you know, on some level, just simply saying, "Yeah, I worshiped." And what will happen is some people will be like, "Oh okay, hey, how about those guys in the gold pants?" really quickly. And that's okay. But there's just a sense of saying, "I am not ashamed."
Conclusion: Embracing the Gift of Grace
That is the good news of the gift of grace—that it's Jesus who brings us back to the Father. And by the way, this is what our world needs more desperately than anything else: people aligning their lives with the God of the universe, which we do when we believe the gospel.
So what's the response today?
For some of us it might be just simply to say, "The truth is before me. Have I believed it? Have I embraced it? Do I acknowledge my sin and trust Jesus Christ?"
For some of us we've done that. And it might be just to say, "Do I live with this obligation, with this eagerness and without being ashamed for the message and the mission that Jesus has?"
And if we can do that, then we can say, "I am embracing the gift of grace that God has given."
Closing Prayer
Let's pray together.
God, we're gathered here, we come from a lot of places. Some of us feel stuck. Maybe we've been living a very self-directed life, building a hut far from your ways. I pray that even that image would just draw us to say we want more. We were created for you, God.
Some of us maybe keep score and feel good about ourselves because of our relative score, or we are stacking rocks. But I ask that you would help each of us to live in the reality that you invited us home through your son, Jesus Christ.
God, sometimes that's uncomfortable because in order to really encounter your love, we have to acknowledge our need. And sometimes it's easier to think we're a finished product than it is acknowledging our need. But I pray in this moment that each of us would not just acknowledge our need, but celebrate that and worship you because of it.
And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Thanks for being here.
AI ENHANCED DISCLAIMER: This transcript has been enhanced using AI technology to improve readability, including the addition of section headers, formatting improvements, and minor grammatical corrections. The core content and meaning of the original sermon have been preserved. For the most authentic experience, please refer to the original audio or video recording.
