How Does the Gospel Save Believers?

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Part 1

INTRO
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 to faith; as it is
written, “but the righteous man shall live by faith.”
Verse 16 says that “the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” Last three
weeks, I argued that what this means is not that the gospel is God’s power to convert people to faith
(although that is indeed true!), but that it means the gospel is God’s power to bring those who keep on
believing to everlasting safety and joy in the presence of God.

Saved from God’s Wrath

One of the things we did not make plain in that message was why we need salvation. Salvation from
what? What’s the problem? The answer in the book of Romans is resoundingly this: we need to be saved
from the wrath of God. Look at Romans 1:18: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” This is given as the
reason why we need saving. God is very angry at our unrighteousness and the way we suppress and
distort the truth to justify ourselves.
Or look in the next chapter, Romans 2:8, to see another glimpse of this. Paul says that “to those who are
selfishly ambitious and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness (notice those two words again, as
in Romans 1:18 — “truth” rejected and “unrighteousness” embraced), [God will render] wrath and
indignation.” This is our problem. God is indignant (feeling or showing anger or annoyance at what is
perceived as unfair treatment) and wrathful (full of or characterized by intense anger) toward us in our
unrighteousness and our untruthfulness.
Or back up just three verses to Romans 2:5: “Because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you
are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.”
God’s wrath is a righteous judgment. When we are unrighteous, God’s righteousness blazes out with
wrath and indignation. He is not to be trifled (treat [someone or something] without seriousness or respect)
with.
This is what we need saving from in the end. This is our ultimate problem: God’s final wrath that
separates us from himself and casts us into hell. If you ask the book of Romans, “What do we need to be
saved from?” the answer comes back — yes, from sin; and yes, from guilt; and yes, from disunity and bad
relationships; and yes, from destructive habits and harmful ways — but mainly the answer is: We need to
be saved from God’s wrath. Our ultimate problem, though very few today see the problem, is that we are
sinners in the hands of an infinite, omnipotent, angry (towards stubborn and unrepentant heart) God.
“The gospel is mainly the good news that God himself, through Jesus, has rescued us from His wrath. Not
mainly from ourselves and the mess we make of our lives, but from his own anger and his own righteous
judgment. The gospel is the power of God for salvation from His wrath — the power that brings us to
eternal safety and joy in the presence of God.”
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(Piper, 1998)
You see it perhaps most clearly of all in Romans 5:9: “Much more then, having now been justified by his
[that is, Jesus’s] blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through him.” In the end, it’s all about
escaping the wrath of God, or, having the wrath of God turned away from us, so that he becomes a friendly
King and not an enemy.
So, when verse 16 says, “The gospel is the power of God for salvation,” it means that the gospel is God’s
power to rescue believers from the “His wrath,” or from “His righteous judgment” (Romans 2:5).

Righteousness Revealed
Now the question in today’s sermon is, “How does the gospel save believers?” “How is the gospel God’s
power for salvation?” And the answer is given in verse 17. Maybe we can feel the force of this verse by
translating it incorrectly and making it say what we might expect it to say, but what it does not say, and
then go back and do it correctly. Let’s read it incorrectly.
Starting at verse 16, “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 love] of God is revealed from
faith to faith.”
Now that is not what it says. But that is where the emphasis for many of us falls, when we think about the
gospel. The gospel is the good news, we say, because in it the love of God is revealed. And indeed, it is.
Romans 5:8 says, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died
for us.” That too is the gospel. The gospel of Jesus is a demonstration and revelation of the love of God for
sinners. But that is not what verse 17 says.
Now there are two simple reasons that I put it this way — why I start with a wrong translation. One is to
make plain that the love of God could not just sweep the unrighteousness of man and the wrath of God
under the rug and pretend all is well. The love of God had to deal with man’s unrighteousness and had to
deal with God’s wrath. The love of God is not a sentimental thing that can just say, “I feel nice to you, and
so I will now be nice to you.” If that were true, the book of Romans would have been a lot shorter than it
is. Indeed, the Bible would have been a lot shorter, and we could have skipped the gruesome story of the
death of the Son of God, the weight of the Old Testament, and the demands of the Law.
“The love of God is a love full of wisdom, a love full of justice, and a love full of truth. It is a love that
upholds all the other attributes of God, rather than blotting them out.”
The love of God is worked out wisely and legally and justly and truthfully — nothing hidden, nothing
suppressed. It takes our unrighteousness and God’s righteousness into account, and deals with them in
the death and resurrection of Jesus. How it does that is what this book, Romans, is mainly about.
Two, the other reason I begin by mentioning what Paul does not say is to stress that Paul must want
Christians to understand how they will be saved from the wrath of God. He must want us to know more
than just that God loves us and sent Jesus to die for us. Think about this! It is so simple and so plain.
Evidently it matters to Christ and to his inspired apostle, Paul, that Christians learn how the gospel is the
power of God for salvation. Because he tells us how — in verse 17, and then for sixteen chapters he tells
us how!
Why do I stress this? I stress it because it is simply unbiblical that so many Christians today have such a
weak grasp — a weak understanding — of what our human condition is without grace, how God planned
our redemption, what God did in Christ to save us, how the Holy Spirit worked in us to convert us, and
how God goes on working (by the gospel, through Scriptures and illumination of the Holy Spirit!) to keep
us, purify us, and fit us for heaven. These are the things that the New Testament (especially Romans) is at
pains to teach Christians, and it is stunning how many Christians simply do not care to know these things
and therefore do not know them. Some care only about the love of God and the shallowness of their
interpretation and therefore miss the weight of the demands and cost of following Christ.
So, I am stressing that in verse 17, instead of saying, “God saved us by his love and that’s all you need to
know,” Paul begins to explain for us how the gospel saves believers. He does not just say, “It shows the
love of God.” Paul gets inside the love of God and shows how God deals with the real problems of the
universe. We begin to learn what the real issues of the universe are. And they are deeper than we think
they are — not the bombings between Israel and the Hamas — but far deeper than that.
“There is an enmity against God and a suppression of truth and a deep unrighteousness of soul and the
almighty wrath of God behind such things that only one power in the universe can overcome — the gospel
of Jesus Christ.”
Starting at verse 17, Paul moves inside the love of God and inside the gospel to show us how the gospel is
that kind of power. And he writes this way because we Christians need to know these things. I’m not
asking you to take a course in theology. I’m asking you to read and care about the inspired word of God in
Romans 1:17. Christ sent his apostle to teach us how the gospel saves believers and brings them safe to
heaven. As verse 17 says, indeed, in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed…

Safely Home
This is what you are going to want to know when the doctor says, “We’ve done all we can do.” And you say,
“How long do I have?” And he says, “A week? Maybe two” — and then face to face with the Maker and
Judge of all the universe, infinite in holiness and unswerving in justice. O my beloved GATE Tacloban, this
is what you are going to want to know. How can I persuade you and win you to care about the most
important things in the world?
I plead with you to get serious about growing in the knowledge of God (Colossians 1:10) and how he
saves the unrighteous. If God inspired Paul to tell us, we ought to want to know. And what a privilege,
comfort, and joy to know! This series on Romans is a golden opportunity — a precious window of time.
We are moving slowly so that you can think, study, read, discuss, review, check things out, and pray over
what you hear. This series has the potential of taking you deep into the heart and mind of God — if you
want to go there. I plead with you: Do not be passive, don’t coast (act or make progress without making
much effort). Make the thought of this letter the thought of your mind. Build your whole way of thinking
and feeling out of the building blocks in this great letter.
So, this morning, would you ask with me this question: How does the gospel save believers? How does
the gospel powerfully bring us to eternal safety and joy in the presence of God when what we really
deserve is God’s wrath, which verse 18 says is already being revealed from heaven? How will the gospel
triumph in those last two weeks of your life to rescue you from despair and terror, and bring you home to
God?
The answer of verse 17 is this: the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes (who
continues to believe) because “in it [that is, in the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to
faith.”
Now here is the puzzle. How can this be good news when the righteousness of God is our problem? The
fact that God is righteous and I am unrighteous is the problem. His wrath is being revealed against the
unrighteousness of man, verse 18 says. Martin Luther said he hated Romans 1:17 before he figured this
out. He wrote,
“I had . . . been captivated with an extraordinary ardor for understanding Paul in the Epistle to the
Romans. But . . . a single word in Chapter 1 [verse 17], ‘In it the righteousness of God is revealed,’ stood in
my way. For I hated that word ‘righteousness of God,’ which . . . I had been taught to understand . . . is the
righteousness [with which God] punishes the unrighteous sinner. (11)”2
God wants to bring us safely home in His presence but how can this be if we who are unrighteousness are
judged based on His righteousness?

Given the Righteousness We Lack

Again, let me ask the question, “How can the gospel be the good news when the righteousness of God is our
problem? The fact that God is righteous and I am unrighteous is the problem. So, how is this good news —
that the righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel? Here’s the answer:
“God demands righteousness and we don’t have it, so the only hope for us is that God himself would give
the righteousness that he demands.”
That would be good news. That would be gospel. And that is what he does.
What is revealed in the gospel is the righteousness of God for us that he demands from us. The reason the
gospel is the power of God for salvation — the way that the gospel saves believers — is that, in it, God
reveals a righteousness for us that He demands from us. What we had to have, but could not create or
supply or perform, God gives us freely, namely, his own righteousness, the righteousness of God.
To close today I want to go back to Martin Luther. Maybe God will use his testimony to bring some of you
from mere hearers this morning to those who love and live on this gospel reality of God’s gift of
righteousness. You remember he said he hated Romans 1:17. But he goes on explaining his struggle with
his own guilt and fear before the righteousness of God:
“Thus, I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Paul at
[Romans 1:17], most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted. At last, by the mercy of God,
meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God
is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand
[that] the righteousness of God is . . . righteousness with which [the] merciful God justifies us by faith…
Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. (11–12)”3
Oh, how I pray that many of you will find this verse a pathway into paradise.
So, this is how the gospel saves us from the wrath of God. You see in verse 18 that “the wrath of God is
revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.” So, what is our rescue? What
is our hope to escape this wrath when we are ungodly and unrighteous? The answer is that God would
intervene and supply us with a righteousness that is not our own. That he would give to us the
righteousness He demands from us. How? Through faith according to Luther. If God would do that, then

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Martin Luther, The Complete Works of Martin Luther: Volume 1, Sermons 1-12
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Martin Luther, The Complete Works of Martin Luther: Volume 1, Sermons 1-12
His wrath would be averted and we could be reconciled to Him. And that is, in fact, what He did. And that
is the gospel. That is the way the gospel saves us – both the believers and the unbelievers.
Now there is two more Sunday’s worth of good news in this verse. Next Sunday, we need to ask, “What is
this gift of God’s righteousness?” (1) Is it the vindication (or proof) of His own justice in the punishment of
our substitute, Jesus? (2) Or is it our right standing with God as forgiven and acquitted sinners without
guilt in His presence? (3) Or is it the moral transformation in us that actually changes our nature into
obedient, righteous children of God? Or is it all three?
And the Sunday after that, we must ask how faith figures (be a significant and noticeable part) into this
saving revelation of the righteousness of God. What does the phrase “from faith to faith” (verse 17) mean?
And how does the quote there from Habakkuk 2:4 help us embrace all this great truth by faith?
Let me end with this: “The gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes,” because in
the gospel God offers to us what He demands from us, namely, His own righteousness. How? He reveals as
a gift in Christ Jesus what was once only a demand. (There is a constant demand towards unrighteous
people the righteousness of God. Without Christ we can never ever reach that demand.) This is how God
saves: through faith/belief in the gospel of Jesus’s death and resurrection by the Holy Spirit’s conviction,
God gives to us the righteousness that He demands from us. i
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(Piper, 1998), italicized words added are mine; sermon reordered on the last part.