Paul Wasn’t Ashamed: The Surprising Strength of God’s Weakness

SPEAKER 01 : 0:05

I was telling you how Paul has come to bring us good news. The book of Romans is about good news. And it’s so important to say that because so many Christians, as I mentioned the other day, approach the book of Romans with some trepidation. They hear about the wrath of God, they hear about being dead to sin, and they hear about all of these complicated, seemingly abstract terminologies that Paul uses, and they shrink from wanting to study it. But if we are willing and are dedicated to pushing forward with our determination to understand this book, this letter of Paul to the Romans, we will find that here is the greatest explanation of the good news anywhere in the Bible. It will train your faith. It will show you how to believe. It will tell you what to believe and how to express that faith to God. So when we read the Bible, we need to ask God, Lord, help me to read it. Help me to read it without fear. Help me to read it with confidence that you are telling me something good. Help me to understand what you are saying to me without hiding from you. And so, Paul comes to that passage which I already explored with you to some extent the other day, but will do more again today. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. Now, Paul had been saying a little earlier, and we won’t go into it in any detail, that he has longed to come to them, but he has been hindered, and he wants to see them on his way to Spain, and so he’s glad to be coming to them now, and please do not misinterpret his delay, for I’m not ashamed of the gospel. He fears that people might think that he is ashamed in that sophisticated Roman city, where people have more intelligence and more education than in other parts of the Roman world, perhaps. You see, in Paul’s day, it was not a popular thing to be a Christian. Well, it’s not a popular thing to be a Christian now, is it all that much? But in those days, it was simply absurd, the idea that a God, that God would come to the world and die on a cross. It was absurd that the Messiah, the one who was supposed to redeem Israel and the world, would come and proclaim himself to be the Messiah and perform all these miracles and then be arrested and executed. And remember, on the most shameful thing, on a cross. The cross was a calculated torture weapon. It was meant to lengthen the death of a person long enough to have him suffer terribly so that he would realize while he’s alive what a wicked thing he had done. It was such a terrible instrument that Romans were not allowed to be executed on a cross. Only those foreigners, only those people lower than a Roman citizen. Jesus was humiliated on the cross. In fact, the Jewish people recognized that the cross was the equivalent of being hanged on a tree. And in the Old Testament, in the Pentateuch, anyone who is hanged upon a tree is cursed. Yet several times in the New Testament, the apostles described Jesus being hanged upon a tree because they were describing that he had been cursed in place of us. So Paul loses his reputation for this silly, absurd, insane idea that the Messiah was crucified. and this absurd idea that God came to the world and allowed himself to be killed. I am not ashamed of the gospel. Paul had reason to be ashamed. He had lost everything. He had lost his reputation as a Hebrew of the tribe of Benjamin, as a member of the Sanhedrin, as a Pharisee, a teacher of the law. He’d lost all that. He was separated from his colleagues. People thought he was so crazy, that is Christians, that they couldn’t even believe that he had been converted. And they avoided him for a long time until it was finally sure that he was a converted man. Paul lost everything for Jesus Christ. And he, as you know, started to preach the gospel, proclaim it, and keep a living going by making tents. Now why specifically, though, was he not ashamed of it? Because, he says, it is the power of God. It is the power of God for salvation. Now we look at these words so religiously we lose their import. It is power from God. The word, as I mentioned the other day, is dunamis, where we get our word dynamite from. But it is very different from worldly power. And that’s where Christians have to be very, very careful because they get so impressed by mega churches and by big denominations and by powerful preachers. And we tend to believe because, well, this guy is powerful. He’s a great preacher. We believe because this is a really reputable denomination. and these have rites and rituals that go back 2,000 years, so it must be good. All of that is false belief. Paul was not a particularly attractive preacher. He couldn’t speak well in public according to what he says himself, and he was ridiculed often. The truth of the matter is, that the power that Paul is talking about is not power of preaching, it is not the power of a denomination, it is not the prestige of a long traditional church going back centuries, it is the weak power of God, that God would choose to come to the world as a baby and hardly recognized, so unrecognized that his mother had no place to give birth to him except a stable, that he would come as a child and grow up as an ordinary child, as the son of a carpenter, and then that he would preach without any portfolio, any recognition from the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Sanhedrin, without any letters to his name, as it were, and then that he would allow himself to be crushed and destroyed on the cross, humiliated naked on that cross, is utterly astonishing. It is the weakness of God. And yet Paul is going to tell us in 1 Corinthians that the weakness of God is the power of God. For what God is wanting to get at is not that we be impressed by his glory, physical glory, but that we be deeply humbled by his tenderness and love and generosity and mercy towards us, giving his life, broken on a cross, for us. And so when things go wrong in your life and everything fails, finances, marriage collapses, you lose your job, your health deteriorates, and everything seems to be falling apart, that is the weak power of God. If you have faith to believe it, you will be marvelously changed if you understand what I’m saying. Because when we experience these weaknesses in the world and in our world, we start putting faith in God in a deeper way. O Lord, I have nothing. You are my all. O Lord, I have no health anymore. You are my resurrection. O Lord, I am financially broke. I am ruined, but you are the restoration of my life. Lord, I have sinned. I have done wrong. I have humiliated myself and others, but you are my atoning sacrifice, and you take away all the sins that I have ever committed. You see then that it is only when we approach our weaknesses and when we experience our weaknesses and go into them and enter them that we begin to realize the weak power of God. Now this power, this weak power then, we should look for it. We should rejoice in our weaknesses. That’s what Paul says. Therefore I rejoice in my weaknesses. For when I am weak, then I am strong. You remember Paul pleaded to God to take away this thorn in the flesh. Some believe it was poor eyesight. And God did not answer him that way, except to say after several pleadings, My strength is made perfect in weakness. My strength is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness. God’s strength becomes very visible when we sense we are so weak that we must put faith in his strength instead of ours. And that’s why you start looking for the weaknesses in your life, and instead of regretting them and bemoaning them and being frightened by them, you rather say, Father, oh, thank you so much for the revelation of this weakness in me. because now I have to rely upon your strength. Have you not known, have you not heard, that the Lord, the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? There is no searching of his understanding. He gives power to the faint, and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youth shall be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint. So says Isaiah in chapter 40. And so God looks for the weak of the world who are looking to him for strength. This is what Paul is talking about when he says, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God to save. It is the power of God for salvation. And we think of that word salvation, and it’s too religious anymore, isn’t it? It’s too hoity-toity, too pie-in-the-sky. The word means rescue. I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God to rescue me. You remember David? He called unto the Lord. He was caught in a horrible pit, and the Lord brought him out of the pit and put a new song in his mouth. That’s what happens to us when we realize that the weakness of God has saved us in our supposed strength. Many thanks for listening today, friends. Colin Cook here, and how it happens. You’ve been listening to my broadcast, which you are perhaps hearing on the radio 10 o’clock in the evening or repeated at 4 in the morning on KLTT AM 670 in the Denver and Colorado and surrounding states areas. 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